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Novel attack slashes computing power needed to crack textbook RSA cryptography
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Novel attack slashes computing power needed to crack textbook RSA cryptography
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The Psychology of Emotion: From Everyday Life to Theory 5 ed. by K. T. Strongman, 2003
This textbook offers a comprehensive guide to all the main theories and concepts of emotion, and relates these back to everyday life, using examples that everyone can identify with. Written in an engaging, accessible style.
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The Psychology of Emotion: From Everyday Life to Theory 5 ed. by K. T. Strongman, 2003
This textbook offers a comprehensive guide to all the main theories and concepts of emotion, and relates these back to everyday life, using examples that everyone can identify with. Written in an engaging, accessible style.
-
The Psychology of Emotion: From Everyday Life to Theory 5 ed. by K. T. Strongman, 2003
This textbook offers a comprehensive guide to all the main theories and concepts of emotion, and relates these back to everyday life, using examples that everyone can identify with. Written in an engaging, accessible style.
-
The Psychology of Emotion: From Everyday Life to Theory 5 ed. by K. T. Strongman, 2003
This textbook offers a comprehensive guide to all the main theories and concepts of emotion, and relates these back to everyday life, using examples that everyone can identify with. Written in an engaging, accessible style.
-
The Psychology of Emotion: From Everyday Life to Theory 5 ed. by K. T. Strongman, 2003
This textbook offers a comprehensive guide to all the main theories and concepts of emotion, and relates these back to everyday life, using examples that everyone can identify with. Written in an engaging, accessible style.
-
Colloid Chemistry by S. Voyutsky
This book is a translation of the second edition of the Russian textbook on colloid chemistry for institutes of chemical engineering (the first Russian edition was published in 1964). It explains the general concepts and laws of colloid chemistry and describes the properties of colloidal systems, the methods of investigating them, and the use of colloid chemistry for solving practical problems. The textbook has a chapter on high-molecular-weight substances and their solutions. The introduction, the chapters on adsorption, and the chapter on the stability and coagulation of colloidal systems have been extensively revised. The book may serve as a textbook for students and postgraduate students of chemical faculties of universities; it will also be of interest to researchers who wish to become acquainted with the modern state of colloid chemistry.
Prof. Sergei Voyutsky, D.Sc. (Chem.), heads the Colloid Chemistry Department of the Lomonosov Institute of Fine Chemical Technology. He specialises in adhesion and in the physico-chemical properties of lattices. He has published over 350 articles in Soviet and foreign journals. Prof. Voyutsky is the author of textbooks on colloid chemistry and polymer solutions, and also of monographs, some of which were translated and published in the United States, Japan, Poland, and other countries. He is a member of the editorial board of the journals Kauchuk i Rezin (Caoutchouc and Rubber) and Kolloidnyi Zhurnal (Colloid Journal).
Translated from the Russian by Nicholas Bobrov.
You can get the book here and here
Follow us on
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Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/mir-titles
Fork us on gitlab https://gitlab.com/mirtitles
CONTENTS
Preface
Author’s Preface
Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION. COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS AND THE SUBJECT MATTER OF COLLOID CHEMISTRY
- Concept of Colloidal Systems and the Definition of Colloid Chemistry as a Science
- Measure of Dispersion
- Heterogeneity of Colloidal Systems as Their Basic Distinction from Molecular Solutions
- Disjoining Pressure
- Effect of the Degree of Dispersion on the Properties of Disperse Systems
- Classification of Colloidal and Microheterogeneous Systems
- Importance of Colloidal Systems and Colloidal Processes in Nature and Engineering
Chapter 2. OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Light Scattering
- Light Absorption
- Colour of Colloidal Systems
- Optical Methods of Investigating Colloidal Systems
Chapter 3. MOLECULAR-KINETIC PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Thermal Motion of Molecules and Brownian Motion
- Diffusion in True Solutions and in Colloidal Systems
- Osmotic Pressure
- Sedimentation Stability
- Sedimentation and Methods of Sedimentation Analysis
Chapter 4. SCIENCE OF ADSORPTION. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLID-GAS INTERFACE
- Concept of Adsorption
- Nature of Adsorption Forces
- Langmuir’s Monomolecular Adsorption Theory
- Polanyi’s Polymolecular Adsorption Theory and the BET (Brunauer, Emmett, and Teller) Theory
- Capillary Condensation
- Chemical Adsorption
- Heat of Adsorption
- Adsorption Rate
- Effect of the Properties of the Adsorbent and the Adsorptive on Adsorption. Dynamic Adsorption. Adsorption from Mixtures of Gases
Chapter 5. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLUTION-GAS INTERFACE
- Surface Tension
- Concept of Surfactants
- Gibbs’ Equation
- Shishkovsky’s Equation. Transition from Gibbs’ Equation to Langmuir’s Equation
- Effect of the Structure and Dimensions of a Surfactant Molecule on Adsorption at the Solution-Gas Interface. Traube’s Rule
- Structure of the Adsorption Layer at the Solution-Gas Interface
- Langmuir’s Balance. Determination of the Dimensions of Surfactant Molecules
Chapter 6. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLID-SOLUTION INTERFACE
- Molecular Adsorption from Solutions
- Ionic Adsorption
- Exchange Adsorption
- Wetting Phenomena
- Adhesion
Chapter 7. ELECTRICAL PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Concept of Electrokinetic Phenomena
- Structure of the Electric Double Layer
- Effect of Different Factors on the Electrokinetic Potential
- Electrophoresis and Electroosmosis
- Determination of the Electrokinetic Potential
- Practical Importance of Electrokinetic Phenomena
- Other Electrical Properties of Colloidal Systems
Chapter 8. OBTAINING AND PURIFYING COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS. STRUCTURE OF COLLOIDAL MICELLES
- Methods of Obtaining Colloidal Systems
- Structure of Colloidal Micelles
- Examples of Obtaining Colloidal Systems
- Purifying Colloidal Systems
Chapter 9. STABILITY AND COAGULATION OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Kinetics of Coagulation
- Stability of Thin Liquid Layers and the Energy of Interaction Between the Surfaces of Two Bodies
- Change in the Energy of Interaction Between Micelles as They Approach One Another
- Solvation of Particles. Structural-Mechanical and Entropy Factors of Stability
- Rules of Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Theories of Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Effect of the Dimensions and Concentration of Particles on Their Interaction in Dispersed Systems
- Importance of Adsorption Phenomena to Coagulation
- Particular Phenomena Observed in Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Coagulation of Sols Having a Non-Aqueous Medium by Electrolytes
- Heterocoagulation and Heteroadagulation of Colloidal Systems
- Coagulation Under the Action of Physical Factors
Chapter 10. STRUCTURAL-MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF DISPERSED SYSTEMS
- Origination and Characteristics of Structures in Colloidal Systems
- Viscosity of True and Colloidal Solutions
- Structural Viscosity
- Mechanical Properties of Colloidal Systems Exhibiting True Elasticity
- Dependence of the Viscosity of Colloidal Systems on the Concentration of the Dispersed Phase
Chapter 11. SYSTEMS HAVING A GASEOUS DISPERSION MEDIUM
- General Characteristics of Aerosols
- Powders and Their Properties
- Methods of Obtaining Aerosols
- Methods of Destroying Aerosols
- Practical Importance of Aerosols
Chapter 12. SYSTEMS HAVING LIQUID AND SOLID DISPERSED PHASES
- Suspensions
- Emulsions
- Lattices
- Foams
- Systems Having a Solid Dispersion Medium
Chapter 13. COLLOIDAL SURFACTANTS
- Principal Concepts and Classification of Colloidal Surfactants
- State of Surfactants in a Solution
- Stabilizing Action of Surfactants
- Solubilization in Surfactant Solutions
- Practical Importance of Colloidal Surfactant Solutions
- Tannins and Dyes
Chapter 14. NATURE AND SOME PROPERTIES OF SOLUTIONS OF MACROMOLECULAR SUBSTANCES
- General Information on Macromolecular Substances
- Polydispersity and Molecular Weight of Macromolecular Substances
- Structure of Macromolecules and Structure of Macromolecular Substances
- Theories of Solutions of Macromolecular Substances
- Thermodynamics of Dissolution of Macromolecular Substances
- Swelling of Macromolecular Substances
- Some Properties of Solutions of Macromolecular Substances
- Polyelectrolytes
- Gels
Recommended Literature
#1978 #adsorption #chemistry #coagulation #colloidChemistry #colloidalSystems #colloids #dispersedSystems #electrokineticPhenomena #macromolecularSubstances #sovietLiterature #surfactants
Index -
Colloid Chemistry by S. Voyutsky
This book is a translation of the second edition of the Russian textbook on colloid chemistry for institutes of chemical engineering (the first Russian edition was published in 1964). It explains the general concepts and laws of colloid chemistry and describes the properties of colloidal systems, the methods of investigating them, and the use of colloid chemistry for solving practical problems. The textbook has a chapter on high-molecular-weight substances and their solutions. The introduction, the chapters on adsorption, and the chapter on the stability and coagulation of colloidal systems have been extensively revised. The book may serve as a textbook for students and postgraduate students of chemical faculties of universities; it will also be of interest to researchers who wish to become acquainted with the modern state of colloid chemistry.
Prof. Sergei Voyutsky, D.Sc. (Chem.), heads the Colloid Chemistry Department of the Lomonosov Institute of Fine Chemical Technology. He specialises in adhesion and in the physico-chemical properties of lattices. He has published over 350 articles in Soviet and foreign journals. Prof. Voyutsky is the author of textbooks on colloid chemistry and polymer solutions, and also of monographs, some of which were translated and published in the United States, Japan, Poland, and other countries. He is a member of the editorial board of the journals Kauchuk i Rezin (Caoutchouc and Rubber) and Kolloidnyi Zhurnal (Colloid Journal).
Translated from the Russian by Nicholas Bobrov.
You can get the book here and here
Follow us on
Twitter https://x.com/MirTitles
Mastadon https://mastodon.social/@mirtitles
Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/mirtitles.bsky.social
Tumblr https://www.tumblr.com/mirtitles
Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/mir-titles
Fork us on gitlab https://gitlab.com/mirtitles
CONTENTS
Preface
Author’s Preface
Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION. COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS AND THE SUBJECT MATTER OF COLLOID CHEMISTRY
- Concept of Colloidal Systems and the Definition of Colloid Chemistry as a Science
- Measure of Dispersion
- Heterogeneity of Colloidal Systems as Their Basic Distinction from Molecular Solutions
- Disjoining Pressure
- Effect of the Degree of Dispersion on the Properties of Disperse Systems
- Classification of Colloidal and Microheterogeneous Systems
- Importance of Colloidal Systems and Colloidal Processes in Nature and Engineering
Chapter 2. OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Light Scattering
- Light Absorption
- Colour of Colloidal Systems
- Optical Methods of Investigating Colloidal Systems
Chapter 3. MOLECULAR-KINETIC PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Thermal Motion of Molecules and Brownian Motion
- Diffusion in True Solutions and in Colloidal Systems
- Osmotic Pressure
- Sedimentation Stability
- Sedimentation and Methods of Sedimentation Analysis
Chapter 4. SCIENCE OF ADSORPTION. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLID-GAS INTERFACE
- Concept of Adsorption
- Nature of Adsorption Forces
- Langmuir’s Monomolecular Adsorption Theory
- Polanyi’s Polymolecular Adsorption Theory and the BET (Brunauer, Emmett, and Teller) Theory
- Capillary Condensation
- Chemical Adsorption
- Heat of Adsorption
- Adsorption Rate
- Effect of the Properties of the Adsorbent and the Adsorptive on Adsorption. Dynamic Adsorption. Adsorption from Mixtures of Gases
Chapter 5. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLUTION-GAS INTERFACE
- Surface Tension
- Concept of Surfactants
- Gibbs’ Equation
- Shishkovsky’s Equation. Transition from Gibbs’ Equation to Langmuir’s Equation
- Effect of the Structure and Dimensions of a Surfactant Molecule on Adsorption at the Solution-Gas Interface. Traube’s Rule
- Structure of the Adsorption Layer at the Solution-Gas Interface
- Langmuir’s Balance. Determination of the Dimensions of Surfactant Molecules
Chapter 6. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLID-SOLUTION INTERFACE
- Molecular Adsorption from Solutions
- Ionic Adsorption
- Exchange Adsorption
- Wetting Phenomena
- Adhesion
Chapter 7. ELECTRICAL PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Concept of Electrokinetic Phenomena
- Structure of the Electric Double Layer
- Effect of Different Factors on the Electrokinetic Potential
- Electrophoresis and Electroosmosis
- Determination of the Electrokinetic Potential
- Practical Importance of Electrokinetic Phenomena
- Other Electrical Properties of Colloidal Systems
Chapter 8. OBTAINING AND PURIFYING COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS. STRUCTURE OF COLLOIDAL MICELLES
- Methods of Obtaining Colloidal Systems
- Structure of Colloidal Micelles
- Examples of Obtaining Colloidal Systems
- Purifying Colloidal Systems
Chapter 9. STABILITY AND COAGULATION OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Kinetics of Coagulation
- Stability of Thin Liquid Layers and the Energy of Interaction Between the Surfaces of Two Bodies
- Change in the Energy of Interaction Between Micelles as They Approach One Another
- Solvation of Particles. Structural-Mechanical and Entropy Factors of Stability
- Rules of Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Theories of Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Effect of the Dimensions and Concentration of Particles on Their Interaction in Dispersed Systems
- Importance of Adsorption Phenomena to Coagulation
- Particular Phenomena Observed in Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Coagulation of Sols Having a Non-Aqueous Medium by Electrolytes
- Heterocoagulation and Heteroadagulation of Colloidal Systems
- Coagulation Under the Action of Physical Factors
Chapter 10. STRUCTURAL-MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF DISPERSED SYSTEMS
- Origination and Characteristics of Structures in Colloidal Systems
- Viscosity of True and Colloidal Solutions
- Structural Viscosity
- Mechanical Properties of Colloidal Systems Exhibiting True Elasticity
- Dependence of the Viscosity of Colloidal Systems on the Concentration of the Dispersed Phase
Chapter 11. SYSTEMS HAVING A GASEOUS DISPERSION MEDIUM
- General Characteristics of Aerosols
- Powders and Their Properties
- Methods of Obtaining Aerosols
- Methods of Destroying Aerosols
- Practical Importance of Aerosols
Chapter 12. SYSTEMS HAVING LIQUID AND SOLID DISPERSED PHASES
- Suspensions
- Emulsions
- Lattices
- Foams
- Systems Having a Solid Dispersion Medium
Chapter 13. COLLOIDAL SURFACTANTS
- Principal Concepts and Classification of Colloidal Surfactants
- State of Surfactants in a Solution
- Stabilizing Action of Surfactants
- Solubilization in Surfactant Solutions
- Practical Importance of Colloidal Surfactant Solutions
- Tannins and Dyes
Chapter 14. NATURE AND SOME PROPERTIES OF SOLUTIONS OF MACROMOLECULAR SUBSTANCES
- General Information on Macromolecular Substances
- Polydispersity and Molecular Weight of Macromolecular Substances
- Structure of Macromolecules and Structure of Macromolecular Substances
- Theories of Solutions of Macromolecular Substances
- Thermodynamics of Dissolution of Macromolecular Substances
- Swelling of Macromolecular Substances
- Some Properties of Solutions of Macromolecular Substances
- Polyelectrolytes
- Gels
Recommended Literature
#1978 #adsorption #chemistry #coagulation #colloidChemistry #colloidalSystems #colloids #dispersedSystems #electrokineticPhenomena #macromolecularSubstances #sovietLiterature #surfactants
Index -
Colloid Chemistry by S. Voyutsky
This book is a translation of the second edition of the Russian textbook on colloid chemistry for institutes of chemical engineering (the first Russian edition was published in 1964). It explains the general concepts and laws of colloid chemistry and describes the properties of colloidal systems, the methods of investigating them, and the use of colloid chemistry for solving practical problems. The textbook has a chapter on high-molecular-weight substances and their solutions. The introduction, the chapters on adsorption, and the chapter on the stability and coagulation of colloidal systems have been extensively revised. The book may serve as a textbook for students and postgraduate students of chemical faculties of universities; it will also be of interest to researchers who wish to become acquainted with the modern state of colloid chemistry.
Prof. Sergei Voyutsky, D.Sc. (Chem.), heads the Colloid Chemistry Department of the Lomonosov Institute of Fine Chemical Technology. He specialises in adhesion and in the physico-chemical properties of lattices. He has published over 350 articles in Soviet and foreign journals. Prof. Voyutsky is the author of textbooks on colloid chemistry and polymer solutions, and also of monographs, some of which were translated and published in the United States, Japan, Poland, and other countries. He is a member of the editorial board of the journals Kauchuk i Rezin (Caoutchouc and Rubber) and Kolloidnyi Zhurnal (Colloid Journal).
Translated from the Russian by Nicholas Bobrov.
You can get the book here and here
Follow us on
Twitter https://x.com/MirTitles
Mastadon https://mastodon.social/@mirtitles
Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/mirtitles.bsky.social
Tumblr https://www.tumblr.com/mirtitles
Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/mir-titles
Fork us on gitlab https://gitlab.com/mirtitles
CONTENTS
Preface
Author’s Preface
Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION. COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS AND THE SUBJECT MATTER OF COLLOID CHEMISTRY
- Concept of Colloidal Systems and the Definition of Colloid Chemistry as a Science
- Measure of Dispersion
- Heterogeneity of Colloidal Systems as Their Basic Distinction from Molecular Solutions
- Disjoining Pressure
- Effect of the Degree of Dispersion on the Properties of Disperse Systems
- Classification of Colloidal and Microheterogeneous Systems
- Importance of Colloidal Systems and Colloidal Processes in Nature and Engineering
Chapter 2. OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Light Scattering
- Light Absorption
- Colour of Colloidal Systems
- Optical Methods of Investigating Colloidal Systems
Chapter 3. MOLECULAR-KINETIC PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Thermal Motion of Molecules and Brownian Motion
- Diffusion in True Solutions and in Colloidal Systems
- Osmotic Pressure
- Sedimentation Stability
- Sedimentation and Methods of Sedimentation Analysis
Chapter 4. SCIENCE OF ADSORPTION. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLID-GAS INTERFACE
- Concept of Adsorption
- Nature of Adsorption Forces
- Langmuir’s Monomolecular Adsorption Theory
- Polanyi’s Polymolecular Adsorption Theory and the BET (Brunauer, Emmett, and Teller) Theory
- Capillary Condensation
- Chemical Adsorption
- Heat of Adsorption
- Adsorption Rate
- Effect of the Properties of the Adsorbent and the Adsorptive on Adsorption. Dynamic Adsorption. Adsorption from Mixtures of Gases
Chapter 5. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLUTION-GAS INTERFACE
- Surface Tension
- Concept of Surfactants
- Gibbs’ Equation
- Shishkovsky’s Equation. Transition from Gibbs’ Equation to Langmuir’s Equation
- Effect of the Structure and Dimensions of a Surfactant Molecule on Adsorption at the Solution-Gas Interface. Traube’s Rule
- Structure of the Adsorption Layer at the Solution-Gas Interface
- Langmuir’s Balance. Determination of the Dimensions of Surfactant Molecules
Chapter 6. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLID-SOLUTION INTERFACE
- Molecular Adsorption from Solutions
- Ionic Adsorption
- Exchange Adsorption
- Wetting Phenomena
- Adhesion
Chapter 7. ELECTRICAL PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Concept of Electrokinetic Phenomena
- Structure of the Electric Double Layer
- Effect of Different Factors on the Electrokinetic Potential
- Electrophoresis and Electroosmosis
- Determination of the Electrokinetic Potential
- Practical Importance of Electrokinetic Phenomena
- Other Electrical Properties of Colloidal Systems
Chapter 8. OBTAINING AND PURIFYING COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS. STRUCTURE OF COLLOIDAL MICELLES
- Methods of Obtaining Colloidal Systems
- Structure of Colloidal Micelles
- Examples of Obtaining Colloidal Systems
- Purifying Colloidal Systems
Chapter 9. STABILITY AND COAGULATION OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Kinetics of Coagulation
- Stability of Thin Liquid Layers and the Energy of Interaction Between the Surfaces of Two Bodies
- Change in the Energy of Interaction Between Micelles as They Approach One Another
- Solvation of Particles. Structural-Mechanical and Entropy Factors of Stability
- Rules of Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Theories of Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Effect of the Dimensions and Concentration of Particles on Their Interaction in Dispersed Systems
- Importance of Adsorption Phenomena to Coagulation
- Particular Phenomena Observed in Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Coagulation of Sols Having a Non-Aqueous Medium by Electrolytes
- Heterocoagulation and Heteroadagulation of Colloidal Systems
- Coagulation Under the Action of Physical Factors
Chapter 10. STRUCTURAL-MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF DISPERSED SYSTEMS
- Origination and Characteristics of Structures in Colloidal Systems
- Viscosity of True and Colloidal Solutions
- Structural Viscosity
- Mechanical Properties of Colloidal Systems Exhibiting True Elasticity
- Dependence of the Viscosity of Colloidal Systems on the Concentration of the Dispersed Phase
Chapter 11. SYSTEMS HAVING A GASEOUS DISPERSION MEDIUM
- General Characteristics of Aerosols
- Powders and Their Properties
- Methods of Obtaining Aerosols
- Methods of Destroying Aerosols
- Practical Importance of Aerosols
Chapter 12. SYSTEMS HAVING LIQUID AND SOLID DISPERSED PHASES
- Suspensions
- Emulsions
- Lattices
- Foams
- Systems Having a Solid Dispersion Medium
Chapter 13. COLLOIDAL SURFACTANTS
- Principal Concepts and Classification of Colloidal Surfactants
- State of Surfactants in a Solution
- Stabilizing Action of Surfactants
- Solubilization in Surfactant Solutions
- Practical Importance of Colloidal Surfactant Solutions
- Tannins and Dyes
Chapter 14. NATURE AND SOME PROPERTIES OF SOLUTIONS OF MACROMOLECULAR SUBSTANCES
- General Information on Macromolecular Substances
- Polydispersity and Molecular Weight of Macromolecular Substances
- Structure of Macromolecules and Structure of Macromolecular Substances
- Theories of Solutions of Macromolecular Substances
- Thermodynamics of Dissolution of Macromolecular Substances
- Swelling of Macromolecular Substances
- Some Properties of Solutions of Macromolecular Substances
- Polyelectrolytes
- Gels
Recommended Literature
#1978 #adsorption #chemistry #coagulation #colloidChemistry #colloidalSystems #colloids #dispersedSystems #electrokineticPhenomena #macromolecularSubstances #sovietLiterature #surfactants
Index -
Colloid Chemistry by S. Voyutsky
This book is a translation of the second edition of the Russian textbook on colloid chemistry for institutes of chemical engineering (the first Russian edition was published in 1964). It explains the general concepts and laws of colloid chemistry and describes the properties of colloidal systems, the methods of investigating them, and the use of colloid chemistry for solving practical problems. The textbook has a chapter on high-molecular-weight substances and their solutions. The introduction, the chapters on adsorption, and the chapter on the stability and coagulation of colloidal systems have been extensively revised. The book may serve as a textbook for students and postgraduate students of chemical faculties of universities; it will also be of interest to researchers who wish to become acquainted with the modern state of colloid chemistry.
Prof. Sergei Voyutsky, D.Sc. (Chem.), heads the Colloid Chemistry Department of the Lomonosov Institute of Fine Chemical Technology. He specialises in adhesion and in the physico-chemical properties of lattices. He has published over 350 articles in Soviet and foreign journals. Prof. Voyutsky is the author of textbooks on colloid chemistry and polymer solutions, and also of monographs, some of which were translated and published in the United States, Japan, Poland, and other countries. He is a member of the editorial board of the journals Kauchuk i Rezin (Caoutchouc and Rubber) and Kolloidnyi Zhurnal (Colloid Journal).
Translated from the Russian by Nicholas Bobrov.
You can get the book here and here
Follow us on
Twitter https://x.com/MirTitles
Mastadon https://mastodon.social/@mirtitles
Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/mirtitles.bsky.social
Tumblr https://www.tumblr.com/mirtitles
Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/mir-titles
Fork us on gitlab https://gitlab.com/mirtitles
CONTENTS
Preface
Author’s Preface
Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION. COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS AND THE SUBJECT MATTER OF COLLOID CHEMISTRY
- Concept of Colloidal Systems and the Definition of Colloid Chemistry as a Science
- Measure of Dispersion
- Heterogeneity of Colloidal Systems as Their Basic Distinction from Molecular Solutions
- Disjoining Pressure
- Effect of the Degree of Dispersion on the Properties of Disperse Systems
- Classification of Colloidal and Microheterogeneous Systems
- Importance of Colloidal Systems and Colloidal Processes in Nature and Engineering
Chapter 2. OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Light Scattering
- Light Absorption
- Colour of Colloidal Systems
- Optical Methods of Investigating Colloidal Systems
Chapter 3. MOLECULAR-KINETIC PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Thermal Motion of Molecules and Brownian Motion
- Diffusion in True Solutions and in Colloidal Systems
- Osmotic Pressure
- Sedimentation Stability
- Sedimentation and Methods of Sedimentation Analysis
Chapter 4. SCIENCE OF ADSORPTION. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLID-GAS INTERFACE
- Concept of Adsorption
- Nature of Adsorption Forces
- Langmuir’s Monomolecular Adsorption Theory
- Polanyi’s Polymolecular Adsorption Theory and the BET (Brunauer, Emmett, and Teller) Theory
- Capillary Condensation
- Chemical Adsorption
- Heat of Adsorption
- Adsorption Rate
- Effect of the Properties of the Adsorbent and the Adsorptive on Adsorption. Dynamic Adsorption. Adsorption from Mixtures of Gases
Chapter 5. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLUTION-GAS INTERFACE
- Surface Tension
- Concept of Surfactants
- Gibbs’ Equation
- Shishkovsky’s Equation. Transition from Gibbs’ Equation to Langmuir’s Equation
- Effect of the Structure and Dimensions of a Surfactant Molecule on Adsorption at the Solution-Gas Interface. Traube’s Rule
- Structure of the Adsorption Layer at the Solution-Gas Interface
- Langmuir’s Balance. Determination of the Dimensions of Surfactant Molecules
Chapter 6. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLID-SOLUTION INTERFACE
- Molecular Adsorption from Solutions
- Ionic Adsorption
- Exchange Adsorption
- Wetting Phenomena
- Adhesion
Chapter 7. ELECTRICAL PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Concept of Electrokinetic Phenomena
- Structure of the Electric Double Layer
- Effect of Different Factors on the Electrokinetic Potential
- Electrophoresis and Electroosmosis
- Determination of the Electrokinetic Potential
- Practical Importance of Electrokinetic Phenomena
- Other Electrical Properties of Colloidal Systems
Chapter 8. OBTAINING AND PURIFYING COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS. STRUCTURE OF COLLOIDAL MICELLES
- Methods of Obtaining Colloidal Systems
- Structure of Colloidal Micelles
- Examples of Obtaining Colloidal Systems
- Purifying Colloidal Systems
Chapter 9. STABILITY AND COAGULATION OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Kinetics of Coagulation
- Stability of Thin Liquid Layers and the Energy of Interaction Between the Surfaces of Two Bodies
- Change in the Energy of Interaction Between Micelles as They Approach One Another
- Solvation of Particles. Structural-Mechanical and Entropy Factors of Stability
- Rules of Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Theories of Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Effect of the Dimensions and Concentration of Particles on Their Interaction in Dispersed Systems
- Importance of Adsorption Phenomena to Coagulation
- Particular Phenomena Observed in Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Coagulation of Sols Having a Non-Aqueous Medium by Electrolytes
- Heterocoagulation and Heteroadagulation of Colloidal Systems
- Coagulation Under the Action of Physical Factors
Chapter 10. STRUCTURAL-MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF DISPERSED SYSTEMS
- Origination and Characteristics of Structures in Colloidal Systems
- Viscosity of True and Colloidal Solutions
- Structural Viscosity
- Mechanical Properties of Colloidal Systems Exhibiting True Elasticity
- Dependence of the Viscosity of Colloidal Systems on the Concentration of the Dispersed Phase
Chapter 11. SYSTEMS HAVING A GASEOUS DISPERSION MEDIUM
- General Characteristics of Aerosols
- Powders and Their Properties
- Methods of Obtaining Aerosols
- Methods of Destroying Aerosols
- Practical Importance of Aerosols
Chapter 12. SYSTEMS HAVING LIQUID AND SOLID DISPERSED PHASES
- Suspensions
- Emulsions
- Lattices
- Foams
- Systems Having a Solid Dispersion Medium
Chapter 13. COLLOIDAL SURFACTANTS
- Principal Concepts and Classification of Colloidal Surfactants
- State of Surfactants in a Solution
- Stabilizing Action of Surfactants
- Solubilization in Surfactant Solutions
- Practical Importance of Colloidal Surfactant Solutions
- Tannins and Dyes
Chapter 14. NATURE AND SOME PROPERTIES OF SOLUTIONS OF MACROMOLECULAR SUBSTANCES
- General Information on Macromolecular Substances
- Polydispersity and Molecular Weight of Macromolecular Substances
- Structure of Macromolecules and Structure of Macromolecular Substances
- Theories of Solutions of Macromolecular Substances
- Thermodynamics of Dissolution of Macromolecular Substances
- Swelling of Macromolecular Substances
- Some Properties of Solutions of Macromolecular Substances
- Polyelectrolytes
- Gels
Recommended Literature
#1978 #adsorption #chemistry #coagulation #colloidChemistry #colloidalSystems #colloids #dispersedSystems #electrokineticPhenomena #macromolecularSubstances #sovietLiterature #surfactants
Index -
Colloid Chemistry by S. Voyutsky
This book is a translation of the second edition of the Russian textbook on colloid chemistry for institutes of chemical engineering (the first Russian edition was published in 1964). It explains the general concepts and laws of colloid chemistry and describes the properties of colloidal systems, the methods of investigating them, and the use of colloid chemistry for solving practical problems. The textbook has a chapter on high-molecular-weight substances and their solutions. The introduction, the chapters on adsorption, and the chapter on the stability and coagulation of colloidal systems have been extensively revised. The book may serve as a textbook for students and postgraduate students of chemical faculties of universities; it will also be of interest to researchers who wish to become acquainted with the modern state of colloid chemistry.
Prof. Sergei Voyutsky, D.Sc. (Chem.), heads the Colloid Chemistry Department of the Lomonosov Institute of Fine Chemical Technology. He specialises in adhesion and in the physico-chemical properties of lattices. He has published over 350 articles in Soviet and foreign journals. Prof. Voyutsky is the author of textbooks on colloid chemistry and polymer solutions, and also of monographs, some of which were translated and published in the United States, Japan, Poland, and other countries. He is a member of the editorial board of the journals Kauchuk i Rezin (Caoutchouc and Rubber) and Kolloidnyi Zhurnal (Colloid Journal).
Translated from the Russian by Nicholas Bobrov.
You can get the book here and here
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CONTENTS
Preface
Author’s Preface
Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION. COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS AND THE SUBJECT MATTER OF COLLOID CHEMISTRY
- Concept of Colloidal Systems and the Definition of Colloid Chemistry as a Science
- Measure of Dispersion
- Heterogeneity of Colloidal Systems as Their Basic Distinction from Molecular Solutions
- Disjoining Pressure
- Effect of the Degree of Dispersion on the Properties of Disperse Systems
- Classification of Colloidal and Microheterogeneous Systems
- Importance of Colloidal Systems and Colloidal Processes in Nature and Engineering
Chapter 2. OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Light Scattering
- Light Absorption
- Colour of Colloidal Systems
- Optical Methods of Investigating Colloidal Systems
Chapter 3. MOLECULAR-KINETIC PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Thermal Motion of Molecules and Brownian Motion
- Diffusion in True Solutions and in Colloidal Systems
- Osmotic Pressure
- Sedimentation Stability
- Sedimentation and Methods of Sedimentation Analysis
Chapter 4. SCIENCE OF ADSORPTION. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLID-GAS INTERFACE
- Concept of Adsorption
- Nature of Adsorption Forces
- Langmuir’s Monomolecular Adsorption Theory
- Polanyi’s Polymolecular Adsorption Theory and the BET (Brunauer, Emmett, and Teller) Theory
- Capillary Condensation
- Chemical Adsorption
- Heat of Adsorption
- Adsorption Rate
- Effect of the Properties of the Adsorbent and the Adsorptive on Adsorption. Dynamic Adsorption. Adsorption from Mixtures of Gases
Chapter 5. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLUTION-GAS INTERFACE
- Surface Tension
- Concept of Surfactants
- Gibbs’ Equation
- Shishkovsky’s Equation. Transition from Gibbs’ Equation to Langmuir’s Equation
- Effect of the Structure and Dimensions of a Surfactant Molecule on Adsorption at the Solution-Gas Interface. Traube’s Rule
- Structure of the Adsorption Layer at the Solution-Gas Interface
- Langmuir’s Balance. Determination of the Dimensions of Surfactant Molecules
Chapter 6. ADSORPTION AT THE SOLID-SOLUTION INTERFACE
- Molecular Adsorption from Solutions
- Ionic Adsorption
- Exchange Adsorption
- Wetting Phenomena
- Adhesion
Chapter 7. ELECTRICAL PROPERTIES OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Concept of Electrokinetic Phenomena
- Structure of the Electric Double Layer
- Effect of Different Factors on the Electrokinetic Potential
- Electrophoresis and Electroosmosis
- Determination of the Electrokinetic Potential
- Practical Importance of Electrokinetic Phenomena
- Other Electrical Properties of Colloidal Systems
Chapter 8. OBTAINING AND PURIFYING COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS. STRUCTURE OF COLLOIDAL MICELLES
- Methods of Obtaining Colloidal Systems
- Structure of Colloidal Micelles
- Examples of Obtaining Colloidal Systems
- Purifying Colloidal Systems
Chapter 9. STABILITY AND COAGULATION OF COLLOIDAL SYSTEMS
- Kinetics of Coagulation
- Stability of Thin Liquid Layers and the Energy of Interaction Between the Surfaces of Two Bodies
- Change in the Energy of Interaction Between Micelles as They Approach One Another
- Solvation of Particles. Structural-Mechanical and Entropy Factors of Stability
- Rules of Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Theories of Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Effect of the Dimensions and Concentration of Particles on Their Interaction in Dispersed Systems
- Importance of Adsorption Phenomena to Coagulation
- Particular Phenomena Observed in Coagulation by Electrolytes
- Coagulation of Sols Having a Non-Aqueous Medium by Electrolytes
- Heterocoagulation and Heteroadagulation of Colloidal Systems
- Coagulation Under the Action of Physical Factors
Chapter 10. STRUCTURAL-MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF DISPERSED SYSTEMS
- Origination and Characteristics of Structures in Colloidal Systems
- Viscosity of True and Colloidal Solutions
- Structural Viscosity
- Mechanical Properties of Colloidal Systems Exhibiting True Elasticity
- Dependence of the Viscosity of Colloidal Systems on the Concentration of the Dispersed Phase
Chapter 11. SYSTEMS HAVING A GASEOUS DISPERSION MEDIUM
- General Characteristics of Aerosols
- Powders and Their Properties
- Methods of Obtaining Aerosols
- Methods of Destroying Aerosols
- Practical Importance of Aerosols
Chapter 12. SYSTEMS HAVING LIQUID AND SOLID DISPERSED PHASES
- Suspensions
- Emulsions
- Lattices
- Foams
- Systems Having a Solid Dispersion Medium
Chapter 13. COLLOIDAL SURFACTANTS
- Principal Concepts and Classification of Colloidal Surfactants
- State of Surfactants in a Solution
- Stabilizing Action of Surfactants
- Solubilization in Surfactant Solutions
- Practical Importance of Colloidal Surfactant Solutions
- Tannins and Dyes
Chapter 14. NATURE AND SOME PROPERTIES OF SOLUTIONS OF MACROMOLECULAR SUBSTANCES
- General Information on Macromolecular Substances
- Polydispersity and Molecular Weight of Macromolecular Substances
- Structure of Macromolecules and Structure of Macromolecular Substances
- Theories of Solutions of Macromolecular Substances
- Thermodynamics of Dissolution of Macromolecular Substances
- Swelling of Macromolecular Substances
- Some Properties of Solutions of Macromolecular Substances
- Polyelectrolytes
- Gels
Recommended Literature
#1978 #adsorption #chemistry #coagulation #colloidChemistry #colloidalSystems #colloids #dispersedSystems #electrokineticPhenomena #macromolecularSubstances #sovietLiterature #surfactants
Index -
The #WhiteHouse #ballroom is a linguistic mask. Court filings reveal an integrated military complex—bomb shelters, bio-defense, and missile-resistant steel. While Mockingbird media plays along with the party-venue charade, the corporate-state nexus is laid bare: #NVIDIA and #Palantir fund the #bunker, then harvest billions in federal contracts. A textbook quid-pro-quo, sanitized by a press that prefers the luxury of the ballroom to the reality of the bunker.
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The #WhiteHouse #ballroom is a linguistic mask. Court filings reveal an integrated military complex—bomb shelters, bio-defense, and missile-resistant steel. While Mockingbird media plays along with the party-venue charade, the corporate-state nexus is laid bare: #NVIDIA and #Palantir fund the #bunker, then harvest billions in federal contracts. A textbook quid-pro-quo, sanitized by a press that prefers the luxury of the ballroom to the reality of the bunker.
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The #WhiteHouse #ballroom is a linguistic mask. Court filings reveal an integrated military complex—bomb shelters, bio-defense, and missile-resistant steel. While Mockingbird media plays along with the party-venue charade, the corporate-state nexus is laid bare: #NVIDIA and #Palantir fund the #bunker, then harvest billions in federal contracts. A textbook quid-pro-quo, sanitized by a press that prefers the luxury of the ballroom to the reality of the bunker.
-
The #WhiteHouse #ballroom is a linguistic mask. Court filings reveal an integrated military complex—bomb shelters, bio-defense, and missile-resistant steel. While Mockingbird media plays along with the party-venue charade, the corporate-state nexus is laid bare: #NVIDIA and #Palantir fund the #bunker, then harvest billions in federal contracts. A textbook quid-pro-quo, sanitized by a press that prefers the luxury of the ballroom to the reality of the bunker.
-
The #WhiteHouse #ballroom is a linguistic mask. Court filings reveal an integrated military complex—bomb shelters, bio-defense, and missile-resistant steel. While Mockingbird media plays along with the party-venue charade, the corporate-state nexus is laid bare: #NVIDIA and #Palantir fund the #bunker, then harvest billions in federal contracts. A textbook quid-pro-quo, sanitized by a press that prefers the luxury of the ballroom to the reality of the bunker.
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The Mercator Mindset: Why the Truth Feels Like an Attack
Table of Contents
- The Global Map, the Lone Dissent, and the Reflex of Scale
- The Three Excuses: How the Establishment Changes the Subject
- The Operating System: The Architecture and the Fool’s Gold
- The Six Defenses: How Everyday Denial Protects the Baseline
- The Historical Precedent: The Great Chain of Being and the Valladolid Debate
- The Accurate Measure: Drawing the World to Scale
Part 1: The Global Map, the Lone Dissent, and the Reflex of Scale
Not long ago at the United Nations, a resolution came up regarding global human rights and the need to finally condemn the lasting damage done by colonialism and racial discrimination. When the votes went up on the big board, the outcome was hard to miss: almost every country on earth voted yes, while the United States stood in a tiny, stubborn minority alongside Israel and Argentina.
Shortly after, an even stranger vote happened. The UN took up an initiative called “Correct the Map,” pushed by African nations to stop using the traditional 1569 Mercator world map in schools and official international business, replacing it with maps that actually show the true sizes of the continents. The vote wasn’t even close: 164 countries voted in favor, six abstained, and exactly one country voted no.
The United States stood entirely alone.
Think about how wild that is for a second. The Mercator map was drawn back in the 1500s by a European mapmaker named Gerardus Mercator. He wasn’t making a classroom teaching tool; he was making a navigation chart for European sailors steering ships by compass. To flatten a spherical earth onto a flat sheet of paper, it drastically distorts landmasses the farther they sit from the equator.
The result? Greenland looks as big as the entire continent of Africa, even though Africa is actually fourteen times bigger. North America looks like a giant hovering over Africa and South America. In real life, Africa is so massive it could easily swallow the contiguous United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe with room left over.
Every modern satellite photo and GPS calculation confirms the old map is a flat-out lie of scale.
Yet, when asked to officially agree on a map that shows the physical earth as it actually exists, the United States dug in its heels and voted “no.”
Why? Because a map is never just a piece of paper. It’s a mirror. If you grow up with a classroom map where your part of the world is drawn twice as big as it really is and sits right in the dead center, you absorb a silent, lifelong lesson: We are naturally larger, naturally more important, and naturally running the show.
Agreeing to an accurate map feels like being shrunk down. It forces an empire to look in the mirror and see itself drawn to scale. And when power is forced to see itself as just one part of the world instead of the center of it, the immediate reaction isn’t humility. It’s irritation.
That exact same irritation plays out in everyday American life.
Whenever writers, historians, or everyday folks highlight the genius of Black inventors, point out how Black neighborhoods were bulldozed to build highways, or explain how modern banks still shortchange Black communities, the pushback from a lot of white readers isn’t thoughtful curiosity. It’s an immediate, defensive eye-roll.
The comments always sound the same: Why does everything have to be about race? Why can’t we just be Americans? If we had a White History Month, you’d call it racist! My family didn’t own slaves, so why are you trying to make me feel guilty?
It’s easy to write this off as bad manners, online trolling, or simple prejudice. But it goes way deeper than that. That irritation is an involuntary reflex. It’s what happens when someone who has lived inside a comfortable, flattering version of history suddenly realizes someone has walked in with truth.
Talking honestly about Black brilliance and Black survival—not as charity cases, but as people who built this country and out-innovated the barriers placed in front of them—threatens the map people have carried in their heads their whole lives.
The Three Excuses: How the Establishment Changes the Subject
When the US voted against the accurate map at the UN, its diplomats gave three official explanations. On paper, they sounded calm and practical. In reality, they are the exact same playbooks people use at the dinner table or online to shut down honest conversations about race.
1. The Vocabulary Trap: The US claimed the map resolution was a “radical ideological project” driven by political correctness, simply because the African sponsors called an accurate map an act of “cognitive justice and memorial repair.” Notice what happened there: instead of arguing about whether the map was scientifically accurate, Washington attacked the words being used. It’s the oldest trick in the book: when you can’t deny the facts, attack the tone of the person pointing them out.
2. “There Are Bigger Things to Worry About”: The American delegation called the vote “superfluous” and a distraction, calling resolutions like it “barnacles” that waste the UN’s time when there are wars to stop and economies to fix. But this is just an excuse to kick the can down the road. If updating the classroom map was really such a trivial little thing, why did the US spend the political capital to stand alone against 164 nations? You don’t fight the entire planet over something you think doesn’t matter.
3. Hiding Behind “Neutrality”: The US argued that the old map is just a practical mathematical tool for navigation and GPS, and that politics shouldn’t pick which map to use. It pretends the status quo is completely neutral. But a map that has taught five hundred years of schoolkids to view the Global South as tiny isn’t “just math.” It’s an ideological habit masquerading as common sense.
The Operating System: The Architecture and the Fool’s Gold
Before we go any further, let’s get something straight: When I write about whiteness, I am not writing about you as an individual.
I’m not sitting in judgment of your character, your parents, or your soul. Human beings have actual cultures, distinct heritages, and rich family traditions. You might be Italian, Irish, German, Polish, Appalachian, or Jewish. Those backgrounds have real history—full of hard work, struggle, beautiful music, and survival.
Whiteness is none of those things. Whiteness isn’t a culture. It isn’t an ethnicity.
Whiteness is a legal system. It was invented in the legal codes of the American colonies in the late 1600s for a very specific business reason: wealthy plantation owners realized that if poor European servants and enslaved African laborers realized they had the same economic enemies and teamed up, the elites would lose their shirts. So they drew a legal line. They created a new legal club called “white” and gave it exclusive rights: the right to own land, the right to vote, and the guarantee that your body would never be sold at an auction block.
Critiquing that broken foundation isn’t an attack on the people living in the house; it’s the only way to fix the house before the whole thing caves in.
Here’s the dirty little secret that the defenders of this setup never want to admit: Whiteness has always been fool’s gold for ordinary white working people.
Back in the 1930s, the great thinker W.E.B. Du Bois called this the “psychological wage.” The wealthy barons running the country knew that if working-class white folks ever realized they were getting squeezed just like Black folks, the game would be over. So they offered poor white workers a counterfeit deal: We’ll pay you lousy wages, work you to the bone in the mills, send you off to fight our wars, and give you zero safety net. But in exchange, we will give you a white skin—which means you will never be at the bottom.
It was a distraction. It convinced generations of working families to fight against their own interests—to oppose strong labor unions, to fight against universal healthcare, and to accept crumbs from the table—just to hold onto the hollow bragging rights of being one step higher on a fake ladder.
Whiteness never made ordinary working-class families rich. It just kept them quiet.
The Six Defenses: How Everyday Denial Protects the Baseline
When you bring up the real history of Black achievement and the legal machinery built to hold it down, people rarely argue with the actual facts. Instead, their defenses usually fall into one of six familiar routines:
- The “Colorblind” Idealist: They love quoting Dr. King’s line about the “content of their character,” but they take it completely out of context. They want to act like race doesn’t exist now that their group has secured the wealth, the property, and the textbooks. Claiming not to “see color” just means demanding that everyone blend into the background—a background that is assumed to be white.
- The Zero-Sum Worrier: They honestly believe that there is only so much praise to go around. If a historian points out that a Black engineer invented a crucial component of the electric light bulb or the telephone, they don’t hear a cool historical fact; they feel like something is being stolen from their heritage.
- The Heritage Defender: This is usually the loudest, angriest group. Their entire identity is built on the idea that the traditional heroes were flawless and that their status was 100% earned by hard work alone. Admitting that Black communities were deliberately held back through state violence and redlining hurts too much, because it means the playing field was never fair. They attack the history to protect their own ego.
- The Clean-Hands Immigrant: They confuse the cause of a system with who benefits from it. Sure, your great-grandfather might have arrived from Italy or Ireland in 1910 with ten cents in his pocket. but eventually when the numbers were getting thin, he was handed a legal ticket to the “white” club. That ticket let his kids buy homes in suburbs with restrictive deeds and join trade unions that locked Black workers out for generations. You don’t have to have built the system to have cashed its checks.
- The Tone Police: They love celebrating the triumphs, but they hate hearing about the crimes. They will happily cheer for George Washington Carver making things from peanuts, but don’t you dare mention the brutal sharecropping system that kept Black farmers in South Carolina and Alabama living in virtual debt slavery. They want Black history to sound like a polite thank-you note.
- The Skeptical Fact-Checker: We teach kids that Thomas Edison single-handedly invented the light bulb and Henry Ford invented the car, completely ignoring the armies of mechanics and assistants doing the actual work. But the second you mention a Black innovator, this person suddenly turns into a hard-nosed patent attorney, looking for any excuse to downgrade the accomplishment to “just an improvement.”
Different words, different tones. But the goal is identical: keep the real map rolled up so nobody sees the true dimensions.
The Historical Precedent: The Great Chain of Being and the Valladolid Debate
This mindset didn’t start with social media, and it didn’t start in America. It goes back more than five hundred years to an old European idea called the Great Chain of Being.
Back in the Middle Ages, thinkers adapted ideas from Aristotle and Christian scholars like Thomas Aquinas to argue that the entire universe was arranged in a strict, vertical ladder designed by God:
In its original medieval formulation, all human beings were on the exact same human step. A king might be treated better than a peasant, but nobody argued that peasants weren’t human beings with souls.
Everything changed in the early 1500s.
When Spanish and Portuguese ships started sailing down the coast of West Africa and over to the Americas, European crowns ran into millions of people they didn’t know existed. The empires wanted gold, silver, and massive cash crops. But their own religion created a problem: if every human being is on the same step on God’s ladder, by what lawful could Christian crowns take their land, and force them to work until they drop?
The answer was simple and brutal: It was not to dismantle the Chain of Being, but to sever the brown and black from the human rung of the ladder.
This came out in the open in 1550 at the famous Valladolid Debate at the Colegio de San Gregorioin Spain. King Charles V ordered a formal hearing to decide a straightforward question: Did Spain have the right to wage war on and conquer native peoples before even trying to convert them to Christianity?
A famous royal scholar named Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda,an eminent humanist scholar and royal court classicist who had never crossed the Atlantic, argued that the answer was yes. Leaning on Aristotle’s doctrine of “natural slavery”, he claimed that some people are born to be masters, and some are born “natural slaves.” Sepúlveda argued that hierarchy was the absolute law of nature: the mind rules the body, the male rules the female, and the civilized rules the barbarian. He claimed that Indigenous Americans lacked fully developed rational souls, declaring them servi a natura (natural slaves). Subjugating them by force was framed not as an act of theft, but as an act of paternal correction required by natural law.
On the other side stood Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who had spent decades living in the Americas. Las Casas mounted an uncompromising defense of universal human dignity, declaring famously before the court: “All the peoples of the world are men.” He methodically demonstrated that Indigenous nations possessed lawful sovereignty, advanced civil governance, sophisticated urban centers, and coherent legal codes. To wage war against them was not a holy mission; it was unprovoked, tyrannical robbery.
Las Casas made an incredible defense. But in his early years, desperate to stop the slaughter of the Native Americans, he made a catastrophic suggestion: he advised the Spanish Crown to import enslaved Africans instead.
At the time, Las Casas bought into the self-serving Portuguese excuse that African captives were captured in “fair wars” under local laws, and he swallowed the myth that African workers were naturally suited for hard labor in the heat.
Years later, Las Casas sat down to do the real research for his history of the Americas, and he read the firsthand journals of the Portuguese slave traders. He read accounts of Portuguese ships raiding peaceful villages at night, setting huts on fire, and snatching crying babies from their mothers on the beaches of West Africa.
The realization wrecked him.
In his classic book, History of the Indies, Las Casas gave one of the most honest apologies ever written by a public figure. He wrote that enslaving Black people was just as wicked, unjust, and tyrannical as enslaving Native Americans, and that claiming he “didn’t know any better” at the time wouldn’t save him on Judgment Day. He warned that Spain would eventually pay a terrible price for building its empire on human misery.
His warning was ignored. The economic machine was too profitable to stop. By the 1700s, European scientists dropped the church language, kept the ladder, and called it “science”—drawing charts that placed Europeans at the very top of the human family and everyone else on lower rungs descending toward the apes.
The Accurate Measure: Drawing the World to Scale
Connect the dots across five hundred years, and modern cultural defensiveness suddenly makes total sense.
The person who gets irritated when you talk about Black excellence, the school board that bans books about the real history of slavery and Jim Crow, and the American diplomat who sits at the UN voting against an accurate map of the globe are all dealing with the same basic fear: the panic of not being the center of everything anymore.
The architecture of whiteness was never built to share the stage as an equal partner. It was designed from day one to be the default, the top of the ladder, the biggest thing on the page. It has to keep the scale distorted, because if people see the real measurements, the illusion of effortless, natural dominance vanishes.
When we share the real history of Black culture, uncover the brilliant minds who were written out of the textbooks, and explain the paper trail of how wealth was moved from one community to another, we aren’t picking a fight. We’re just updating the map. We’re taking down the distorted projection and showing the world as it actually is.
Dropping the fake map isn’t an attack on anyone. It is civic duty.
The defense of this five-hundred-year-old hierarchy keeps everyone exhausted, financially insecure, and locked in a manufactured state of scarcity.. When we retire the distorted Mercator projection of our history and our economy, the powerful are terrified because their monopoly is exposed. But the vast majority of human beings—Black, brown, and white—stand only to gain.
An accurate map does not shrink the world; it simply shows the world as it actually is. And an accurate accounting of power does not rob ordinary people of their heritage; it frees them from paying interest on a debt they never owed, in defense of a system that was never built to love them back.
Yet as real as this psychological pushback is, hurt feelings alone don’t explain why state legislatures pass massive laws to block Black progress today. Annoyed comments are just the smoke; they aren’t the fire.
Old ideas have a way of finding lawyers, and ladders of supremacy have a way of turning into actual property deeds.
In Part 2, we’re going to leave the psychology behind and look at the money and the land. We’ll go to a wooden closing table in Denmark, South Carolina, where an explicit racial clause typed into a house deed shows that this isn’t just about pride—it’s about property. And we’ll look at the cold, hard numbers that explain why the establishment fights Black progress today not out of a bad mood, but out of total panic over who actually owns the wealth of this country.
Glossary of Terms
- Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566): Early Spanish Dominican friar, historian, and social reformer who served as the first resident Bishop of Chiapas and was officially appointed “Protector of the Indians.” While initially advocating for importing African laborers to spare indigenous populations, he later famously recanted in his Historia de las Indias, equating the immorality of African enslavement to Indigenous subjugation.
- Cognitive Justice: A human rights and epistemological framework asserting the right of diverse knowledge systems, cultural narratives, and spatial representations to coexist without being subordinated by dominant imperial canons.
- Equal-Area Projection: A mathematical cartographic method (such as the Gall-Peters, Hobo-Dyer, or Equal Earth projections) that preserves the proportional area of all geographic regions relative to one another, preventing the visual distortion that inflates subpolar regions and shrinks equatorial continents.
- Great Chain of Being (Scala Naturae): A classical Greek and medieval theological concept asserting that all matter and life exist on a continuous, rigid, divinely ordained vertical hierarchy descending from God and angels down through humanity, animals, plants, and minerals.
- Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573): Spanish humanist, philosopher, and royal court chronicler who argued at the Valladolid Debate that Indigenous Americans were “natural slaves” (servi a natura) under Aristotelian natural law, thereby justifying military conquest and forced labor.
- Mercator Projection: A conformal, cylindrical map projection developed in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator. Engineered strictly for marine compass navigation (rhumb lines), it significantly distorts geographic area as latitude increases toward the poles, artificially exaggerating North America and Europe while drastically shrinking Africa and South America.
- Psychological Wage: A socio-economic term coined by civil rights scholar W.E.B. Du Bois in 1935 describing the non-monetary, social status granted to working-class white laborers by the ruling elite. This artificial status served to placate white workers with social superiority over Black laborers, actively discouraging interracial labor solidarity.
- Valladolid Debate (1550–1551): The first formal moral and philosophical council convened in early modern Europe (at the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid, Spain) by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to deliberate whether European crowns had the legal and divine right to conquer, enslave, and evangelize Indigenous peoples by force.
- Whiteness (Systemic/Legal): An engineered statutory caste and property status first codified in the late 17th-century American colonial legal codes to separate European laborers from enslaved Africans, establish legal immunity from chattel slavery, and limit the rights of property ownership, civic participation, and citizenship to designated European lineages.
Bibliography
- Aristotle.Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885. (Specifically Book I, Chapters 3–7, outlining the classical doctrine of “natural slavery”).
- Du Bois, W.E.B.Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in North America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. (Foundational source for the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness).
- Hanke, Lewis.All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the Religious and Intellectual Capacity of the American Indians. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974.
- Las Casas, Bartolomé de.History of the Indies (Historia de las Indias). Translated and edited by Andrée M. Collard. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. (Specifically Book III, Chapter 129, detailing his moral recantation regarding the transatlantic trade in African captives).
- Lovejoy, Arthur O.The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936.
- Monmonier, Mark.Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
- Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de.Democrates Alter, sive de justis belli causis apud Indos (Treatise on the Just Causes of War Against the Indians). Edited and translated by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. Madrid: Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, 1892 (originally drafted ca. 1545).
- United Nations General Assembly.Official Records of the General Assembly: Explanation of Vote on the “Correct the Map” Initiative. New York: United Nations Document Records, 2026.
- Zurara, Gomes Eanes de.The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea (Crónica dos Feitos da Guiné). Translated by Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage. London: Hakluyt Society, 1896 (originally compiled ca. 1453).
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The Mercator Mindset: Why the Truth Feels Like an Attack
Table of Contents
- The Global Map, the Lone Dissent, and the Reflex of Scale
- The Three Excuses: How the Establishment Changes the Subject
- The Operating System: The Architecture and the Fool’s Gold
- The Six Defenses: How Everyday Denial Protects the Baseline
- The Historical Precedent: The Great Chain of Being and the Valladolid Debate
- The Accurate Measure: Drawing the World to Scale
Part 1: The Global Map, the Lone Dissent, and the Reflex of Scale
Not long ago at the United Nations, a resolution came up regarding global human rights and the need to finally condemn the lasting damage done by colonialism and racial discrimination. When the votes went up on the big board, the outcome was hard to miss: almost every country on earth voted yes, while the United States stood in a tiny, stubborn minority alongside Israel and Argentina.
Shortly after, an even stranger vote happened. The UN took up an initiative called “Correct the Map,” pushed by African nations to stop using the traditional 1569 Mercator world map in schools and official international business, replacing it with maps that actually show the true sizes of the continents. The vote wasn’t even close: 164 countries voted in favor, six abstained, and exactly one country voted no.
The United States stood entirely alone.
Think about how wild that is for a second. The Mercator map was drawn back in the 1500s by a European mapmaker named Gerardus Mercator. He wasn’t making a classroom teaching tool; he was making a navigation chart for European sailors steering ships by compass. To flatten a spherical earth onto a flat sheet of paper, it drastically distorts landmasses the farther they sit from the equator.
The result? Greenland looks as big as the entire continent of Africa, even though Africa is actually fourteen times bigger. North America looks like a giant hovering over Africa and South America. In real life, Africa is so massive it could easily swallow the contiguous United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe with room left over.
Every modern satellite photo and GPS calculation confirms the old map is a flat-out lie of scale.
Yet, when asked to officially agree on a map that shows the physical earth as it actually exists, the United States dug in its heels and voted “no.”
Why? Because a map is never just a piece of paper. It’s a mirror. If you grow up with a classroom map where your part of the world is drawn twice as big as it really is and sits right in the dead center, you absorb a silent, lifelong lesson: We are naturally larger, naturally more important, and naturally running the show.
Agreeing to an accurate map feels like being shrunk down. It forces an empire to look in the mirror and see itself drawn to scale. And when power is forced to see itself as just one part of the world instead of the center of it, the immediate reaction isn’t humility. It’s irritation.
That exact same irritation plays out in everyday American life.
Whenever writers, historians, or everyday folks highlight the genius of Black inventors, point out how Black neighborhoods were bulldozed to build highways, or explain how modern banks still shortchange Black communities, the pushback from a lot of white readers isn’t thoughtful curiosity. It’s an immediate, defensive eye-roll.
The comments always sound the same: Why does everything have to be about race? Why can’t we just be Americans? If we had a White History Month, you’d call it racist! My family didn’t own slaves, so why are you trying to make me feel guilty?
It’s easy to write this off as bad manners, online trolling, or simple prejudice. But it goes way deeper than that. That irritation is an involuntary reflex. It’s what happens when someone who has lived inside a comfortable, flattering version of history suddenly realizes someone has walked in with truth.
Talking honestly about Black brilliance and Black survival—not as charity cases, but as people who built this country and out-innovated the barriers placed in front of them—threatens the map people have carried in their heads their whole lives.
The Three Excuses: How the Establishment Changes the Subject
When the US voted against the accurate map at the UN, its diplomats gave three official explanations. On paper, they sounded calm and practical. In reality, they are the exact same playbooks people use at the dinner table or online to shut down honest conversations about race.
1. The Vocabulary Trap: The US claimed the map resolution was a “radical ideological project” driven by political correctness, simply because the African sponsors called an accurate map an act of “cognitive justice and memorial repair.” Notice what happened there: instead of arguing about whether the map was scientifically accurate, Washington attacked the words being used. It’s the oldest trick in the book: when you can’t deny the facts, attack the tone of the person pointing them out.
2. “There Are Bigger Things to Worry About”: The American delegation called the vote “superfluous” and a distraction, calling resolutions like it “barnacles” that waste the UN’s time when there are wars to stop and economies to fix. But this is just an excuse to kick the can down the road. If updating the classroom map was really such a trivial little thing, why did the US spend the political capital to stand alone against 164 nations? You don’t fight the entire planet over something you think doesn’t matter.
3. Hiding Behind “Neutrality”: The US argued that the old map is just a practical mathematical tool for navigation and GPS, and that politics shouldn’t pick which map to use. It pretends the status quo is completely neutral. But a map that has taught five hundred years of schoolkids to view the Global South as tiny isn’t “just math.” It’s an ideological habit masquerading as common sense.
The Operating System: The Architecture and the Fool’s Gold
Before we go any further, let’s get something straight: When I write about whiteness, I am not writing about you as an individual.
I’m not sitting in judgment of your character, your parents, or your soul. Human beings have actual cultures, distinct heritages, and rich family traditions. You might be Italian, Irish, German, Polish, Appalachian, or Jewish. Those backgrounds have real history—full of hard work, struggle, beautiful music, and survival.
Whiteness is none of those things. Whiteness isn’t a culture. It isn’t an ethnicity.
Whiteness is a legal system. It was invented in the legal codes of the American colonies in the late 1600s for a very specific business reason: wealthy plantation owners realized that if poor European servants and enslaved African laborers realized they had the same economic enemies and teamed up, the elites would lose their shirts. So they drew a legal line. They created a new legal club called “white” and gave it exclusive rights: the right to own land, the right to vote, and the guarantee that your body would never be sold at an auction block.
Critiquing that broken foundation isn’t an attack on the people living in the house; it’s the only way to fix the house before the whole thing caves in.
Here’s the dirty little secret that the defenders of this setup never want to admit: Whiteness has always been fool’s gold for ordinary white working people.
Back in the 1930s, the great thinker W.E.B. Du Bois called this the “psychological wage.” The wealthy barons running the country knew that if working-class white folks ever realized they were getting squeezed just like Black folks, the game would be over. So they offered poor white workers a counterfeit deal: We’ll pay you lousy wages, work you to the bone in the mills, send you off to fight our wars, and give you zero safety net. But in exchange, we will give you a white skin—which means you will never be at the bottom.
It was a distraction. It convinced generations of working families to fight against their own interests—to oppose strong labor unions, to fight against universal healthcare, and to accept crumbs from the table—just to hold onto the hollow bragging rights of being one step higher on a fake ladder.
Whiteness never made ordinary working-class families rich. It just kept them quiet.
The Six Defenses: How Everyday Denial Protects the Baseline
When you bring up the real history of Black achievement and the legal machinery built to hold it down, people rarely argue with the actual facts. Instead, their defenses usually fall into one of six familiar routines:
- The “Colorblind” Idealist: They love quoting Dr. King’s line about the “content of their character,” but they take it completely out of context. They want to act like race doesn’t exist now that their group has secured the wealth, the property, and the textbooks. Claiming not to “see color” just means demanding that everyone blend into the background—a background that is assumed to be white.
- The Zero-Sum Worrier: They honestly believe that there is only so much praise to go around. If a historian points out that a Black engineer invented a crucial component of the electric light bulb or the telephone, they don’t hear a cool historical fact; they feel like something is being stolen from their heritage.
- The Heritage Defender: This is usually the loudest, angriest group. Their entire identity is built on the idea that the traditional heroes were flawless and that their status was 100% earned by hard work alone. Admitting that Black communities were deliberately held back through state violence and redlining hurts too much, because it means the playing field was never fair. They attack the history to protect their own ego.
- The Clean-Hands Immigrant: They confuse the cause of a system with who benefits from it. Sure, your great-grandfather might have arrived from Italy or Ireland in 1910 with ten cents in his pocket. but eventually when the numbers were getting thin, he was handed a legal ticket to the “white” club. That ticket let his kids buy homes in suburbs with restrictive deeds and join trade unions that locked Black workers out for generations. You don’t have to have built the system to have cashed its checks.
- The Tone Police: They love celebrating the triumphs, but they hate hearing about the crimes. They will happily cheer for George Washington Carver making things from peanuts, but don’t you dare mention the brutal sharecropping system that kept Black farmers in South Carolina and Alabama living in virtual debt slavery. They want Black history to sound like a polite thank-you note.
- The Skeptical Fact-Checker: We teach kids that Thomas Edison single-handedly invented the light bulb and Henry Ford invented the car, completely ignoring the armies of mechanics and assistants doing the actual work. But the second you mention a Black innovator, this person suddenly turns into a hard-nosed patent attorney, looking for any excuse to downgrade the accomplishment to “just an improvement.”
Different words, different tones. But the goal is identical: keep the real map rolled up so nobody sees the true dimensions.
The Historical Precedent: The Great Chain of Being and the Valladolid Debate
This mindset didn’t start with social media, and it didn’t start in America. It goes back more than five hundred years to an old European idea called the Great Chain of Being.
Back in the Middle Ages, thinkers adapted ideas from Aristotle and Christian scholars like Thomas Aquinas to argue that the entire universe was arranged in a strict, vertical ladder designed by God:
In its original medieval formulation, all human beings were on the exact same human step. A king might be treated better than a peasant, but nobody argued that peasants weren’t human beings with souls.
Everything changed in the early 1500s.
When Spanish and Portuguese ships started sailing down the coast of West Africa and over to the Americas, European crowns ran into millions of people they didn’t know existed. The empires wanted gold, silver, and massive cash crops. But their own religion created a problem: if every human being is on the same step on God’s ladder, by what lawful could Christian crowns take their land, and force them to work until they drop?
The answer was simple and brutal: It was not to dismantle the Chain of Being, but to sever the brown and black from the human rung of the ladder.
This came out in the open in 1550 at the famous Valladolid Debate at the Colegio de San Gregorioin Spain. King Charles V ordered a formal hearing to decide a straightforward question: Did Spain have the right to wage war on and conquer native peoples before even trying to convert them to Christianity?
A famous royal scholar named Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda,an eminent humanist scholar and royal court classicist who had never crossed the Atlantic, argued that the answer was yes. Leaning on Aristotle’s doctrine of “natural slavery”, he claimed that some people are born to be masters, and some are born “natural slaves.” Sepúlveda argued that hierarchy was the absolute law of nature: the mind rules the body, the male rules the female, and the civilized rules the barbarian. He claimed that Indigenous Americans lacked fully developed rational souls, declaring them servi a natura (natural slaves). Subjugating them by force was framed not as an act of theft, but as an act of paternal correction required by natural law.
On the other side stood Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who had spent decades living in the Americas. Las Casas mounted an uncompromising defense of universal human dignity, declaring famously before the court: “All the peoples of the world are men.” He methodically demonstrated that Indigenous nations possessed lawful sovereignty, advanced civil governance, sophisticated urban centers, and coherent legal codes. To wage war against them was not a holy mission; it was unprovoked, tyrannical robbery.
Las Casas made an incredible defense. But in his early years, desperate to stop the slaughter of the Native Americans, he made a catastrophic suggestion: he advised the Spanish Crown to import enslaved Africans instead.
At the time, Las Casas bought into the self-serving Portuguese excuse that African captives were captured in “fair wars” under local laws, and he swallowed the myth that African workers were naturally suited for hard labor in the heat.
Years later, Las Casas sat down to do the real research for his history of the Americas, and he read the firsthand journals of the Portuguese slave traders. He read accounts of Portuguese ships raiding peaceful villages at night, setting huts on fire, and snatching crying babies from their mothers on the beaches of West Africa.
The realization wrecked him.
In his classic book, History of the Indies, Las Casas gave one of the most honest apologies ever written by a public figure. He wrote that enslaving Black people was just as wicked, unjust, and tyrannical as enslaving Native Americans, and that claiming he “didn’t know any better” at the time wouldn’t save him on Judgment Day. He warned that Spain would eventually pay a terrible price for building its empire on human misery.
His warning was ignored. The economic machine was too profitable to stop. By the 1700s, European scientists dropped the church language, kept the ladder, and called it “science”—drawing charts that placed Europeans at the very top of the human family and everyone else on lower rungs descending toward the apes.
The Accurate Measure: Drawing the World to Scale
Connect the dots across five hundred years, and modern cultural defensiveness suddenly makes total sense.
The person who gets irritated when you talk about Black excellence, the school board that bans books about the real history of slavery and Jim Crow, and the American diplomat who sits at the UN voting against an accurate map of the globe are all dealing with the same basic fear: the panic of not being the center of everything anymore.
The architecture of whiteness was never built to share the stage as an equal partner. It was designed from day one to be the default, the top of the ladder, the biggest thing on the page. It has to keep the scale distorted, because if people see the real measurements, the illusion of effortless, natural dominance vanishes.
When we share the real history of Black culture, uncover the brilliant minds who were written out of the textbooks, and explain the paper trail of how wealth was moved from one community to another, we aren’t picking a fight. We’re just updating the map. We’re taking down the distorted projection and showing the world as it actually is.
Dropping the fake map isn’t an attack on anyone. It is civic duty.
The defense of this five-hundred-year-old hierarchy keeps everyone exhausted, financially insecure, and locked in a manufactured state of scarcity.. When we retire the distorted Mercator projection of our history and our economy, the powerful are terrified because their monopoly is exposed. But the vast majority of human beings—Black, brown, and white—stand only to gain.
An accurate map does not shrink the world; it simply shows the world as it actually is. And an accurate accounting of power does not rob ordinary people of their heritage; it frees them from paying interest on a debt they never owed, in defense of a system that was never built to love them back.
Yet as real as this psychological pushback is, hurt feelings alone don’t explain why state legislatures pass massive laws to block Black progress today. Annoyed comments are just the smoke; they aren’t the fire.
Old ideas have a way of finding lawyers, and ladders of supremacy have a way of turning into actual property deeds.
In Part 2, we’re going to leave the psychology behind and look at the money and the land. We’ll go to a wooden closing table in Denmark, South Carolina, where an explicit racial clause typed into a house deed shows that this isn’t just about pride—it’s about property. And we’ll look at the cold, hard numbers that explain why the establishment fights Black progress today not out of a bad mood, but out of total panic over who actually owns the wealth of this country.
Glossary of Terms
- Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566): Early Spanish Dominican friar, historian, and social reformer who served as the first resident Bishop of Chiapas and was officially appointed “Protector of the Indians.” While initially advocating for importing African laborers to spare indigenous populations, he later famously recanted in his Historia de las Indias, equating the immorality of African enslavement to Indigenous subjugation.
- Cognitive Justice: A human rights and epistemological framework asserting the right of diverse knowledge systems, cultural narratives, and spatial representations to coexist without being subordinated by dominant imperial canons.
- Equal-Area Projection: A mathematical cartographic method (such as the Gall-Peters, Hobo-Dyer, or Equal Earth projections) that preserves the proportional area of all geographic regions relative to one another, preventing the visual distortion that inflates subpolar regions and shrinks equatorial continents.
- Great Chain of Being (Scala Naturae): A classical Greek and medieval theological concept asserting that all matter and life exist on a continuous, rigid, divinely ordained vertical hierarchy descending from God and angels down through humanity, animals, plants, and minerals.
- Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573): Spanish humanist, philosopher, and royal court chronicler who argued at the Valladolid Debate that Indigenous Americans were “natural slaves” (servi a natura) under Aristotelian natural law, thereby justifying military conquest and forced labor.
- Mercator Projection: A conformal, cylindrical map projection developed in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator. Engineered strictly for marine compass navigation (rhumb lines), it significantly distorts geographic area as latitude increases toward the poles, artificially exaggerating North America and Europe while drastically shrinking Africa and South America.
- Psychological Wage: A socio-economic term coined by civil rights scholar W.E.B. Du Bois in 1935 describing the non-monetary, social status granted to working-class white laborers by the ruling elite. This artificial status served to placate white workers with social superiority over Black laborers, actively discouraging interracial labor solidarity.
- Valladolid Debate (1550–1551): The first formal moral and philosophical council convened in early modern Europe (at the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid, Spain) by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to deliberate whether European crowns had the legal and divine right to conquer, enslave, and evangelize Indigenous peoples by force.
- Whiteness (Systemic/Legal): An engineered statutory caste and property status first codified in the late 17th-century American colonial legal codes to separate European laborers from enslaved Africans, establish legal immunity from chattel slavery, and limit the rights of property ownership, civic participation, and citizenship to designated European lineages.
Bibliography
- Aristotle.Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885. (Specifically Book I, Chapters 3–7, outlining the classical doctrine of “natural slavery”).
- Du Bois, W.E.B.Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in North America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. (Foundational source for the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness).
- Hanke, Lewis.All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the Religious and Intellectual Capacity of the American Indians. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974.
- Las Casas, Bartolomé de.History of the Indies (Historia de las Indias). Translated and edited by Andrée M. Collard. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. (Specifically Book III, Chapter 129, detailing his moral recantation regarding the transatlantic trade in African captives).
- Lovejoy, Arthur O.The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936.
- Monmonier, Mark.Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
- Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de.Democrates Alter, sive de justis belli causis apud Indos (Treatise on the Just Causes of War Against the Indians). Edited and translated by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. Madrid: Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, 1892 (originally drafted ca. 1545).
- United Nations General Assembly.Official Records of the General Assembly: Explanation of Vote on the “Correct the Map” Initiative. New York: United Nations Document Records, 2026.
- Zurara, Gomes Eanes de.The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea (Crónica dos Feitos da Guiné). Translated by Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage. London: Hakluyt Society, 1896 (originally compiled ca. 1453).
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The Mercator Mindset: Why the Truth Feels Like an Attack
Table of Contents
- The Global Map, the Lone Dissent, and the Reflex of Scale
- The Three Excuses: How the Establishment Changes the Subject
- The Operating System: The Architecture and the Fool’s Gold
- The Six Defenses: How Everyday Denial Protects the Baseline
- The Historical Precedent: The Great Chain of Being and the Valladolid Debate
- The Accurate Measure: Drawing the World to Scale
Part 1: The Global Map, the Lone Dissent, and the Reflex of Scale
Not long ago at the United Nations, a resolution came up regarding global human rights and the need to finally condemn the lasting damage done by colonialism and racial discrimination. When the votes went up on the big board, the outcome was hard to miss: almost every country on earth voted yes, while the United States stood in a tiny, stubborn minority alongside Israel and Argentina.
Shortly after, an even stranger vote happened. The UN took up an initiative called “Correct the Map,” pushed by African nations to stop using the traditional 1569 Mercator world map in schools and official international business, replacing it with maps that actually show the true sizes of the continents. The vote wasn’t even close: 164 countries voted in favor, six abstained, and exactly one country voted no.
The United States stood entirely alone.
Think about how wild that is for a second. The Mercator map was drawn back in the 1500s by a European mapmaker named Gerardus Mercator. He wasn’t making a classroom teaching tool; he was making a navigation chart for European sailors steering ships by compass. To flatten a spherical earth onto a flat sheet of paper, it drastically distorts landmasses the farther they sit from the equator.
The result? Greenland looks as big as the entire continent of Africa, even though Africa is actually fourteen times bigger. North America looks like a giant hovering over Africa and South America. In real life, Africa is so massive it could easily swallow the contiguous United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe with room left over.
Every modern satellite photo and GPS calculation confirms the old map is a flat-out lie of scale.
Yet, when asked to officially agree on a map that shows the physical earth as it actually exists, the United States dug in its heels and voted “no.”
Why? Because a map is never just a piece of paper. It’s a mirror. If you grow up with a classroom map where your part of the world is drawn twice as big as it really is and sits right in the dead center, you absorb a silent, lifelong lesson: We are naturally larger, naturally more important, and naturally running the show.
Agreeing to an accurate map feels like being shrunk down. It forces an empire to look in the mirror and see itself drawn to scale. And when power is forced to see itself as just one part of the world instead of the center of it, the immediate reaction isn’t humility. It’s irritation.
That exact same irritation plays out in everyday American life.
Whenever writers, historians, or everyday folks highlight the genius of Black inventors, point out how Black neighborhoods were bulldozed to build highways, or explain how modern banks still shortchange Black communities, the pushback from a lot of white readers isn’t thoughtful curiosity. It’s an immediate, defensive eye-roll.
The comments always sound the same: Why does everything have to be about race? Why can’t we just be Americans? If we had a White History Month, you’d call it racist! My family didn’t own slaves, so why are you trying to make me feel guilty?
It’s easy to write this off as bad manners, online trolling, or simple prejudice. But it goes way deeper than that. That irritation is an involuntary reflex. It’s what happens when someone who has lived inside a comfortable, flattering version of history suddenly realizes someone has walked in with truth.
Talking honestly about Black brilliance and Black survival—not as charity cases, but as people who built this country and out-innovated the barriers placed in front of them—threatens the map people have carried in their heads their whole lives.
The Three Excuses: How the Establishment Changes the Subject
When the US voted against the accurate map at the UN, its diplomats gave three official explanations. On paper, they sounded calm and practical. In reality, they are the exact same playbooks people use at the dinner table or online to shut down honest conversations about race.
1. The Vocabulary Trap: The US claimed the map resolution was a “radical ideological project” driven by political correctness, simply because the African sponsors called an accurate map an act of “cognitive justice and memorial repair.” Notice what happened there: instead of arguing about whether the map was scientifically accurate, Washington attacked the words being used. It’s the oldest trick in the book: when you can’t deny the facts, attack the tone of the person pointing them out.
2. “There Are Bigger Things to Worry About”: The American delegation called the vote “superfluous” and a distraction, calling resolutions like it “barnacles” that waste the UN’s time when there are wars to stop and economies to fix. But this is just an excuse to kick the can down the road. If updating the classroom map was really such a trivial little thing, why did the US spend the political capital to stand alone against 164 nations? You don’t fight the entire planet over something you think doesn’t matter.
3. Hiding Behind “Neutrality”: The US argued that the old map is just a practical mathematical tool for navigation and GPS, and that politics shouldn’t pick which map to use. It pretends the status quo is completely neutral. But a map that has taught five hundred years of schoolkids to view the Global South as tiny isn’t “just math.” It’s an ideological habit masquerading as common sense.
The Operating System: The Architecture and the Fool’s Gold
Before we go any further, let’s get something straight: When I write about whiteness, I am not writing about you as an individual.
I’m not sitting in judgment of your character, your parents, or your soul. Human beings have actual cultures, distinct heritages, and rich family traditions. You might be Italian, Irish, German, Polish, Appalachian, or Jewish. Those backgrounds have real history—full of hard work, struggle, beautiful music, and survival.
Whiteness is none of those things. Whiteness isn’t a culture. It isn’t an ethnicity.
Whiteness is a legal system. It was invented in the legal codes of the American colonies in the late 1600s for a very specific business reason: wealthy plantation owners realized that if poor European servants and enslaved African laborers realized they had the same economic enemies and teamed up, the elites would lose their shirts. So they drew a legal line. They created a new legal club called “white” and gave it exclusive rights: the right to own land, the right to vote, and the guarantee that your body would never be sold at an auction block.
Critiquing that broken foundation isn’t an attack on the people living in the house; it’s the only way to fix the house before the whole thing caves in.
Here’s the dirty little secret that the defenders of this setup never want to admit: Whiteness has always been fool’s gold for ordinary white working people.
Back in the 1930s, the great thinker W.E.B. Du Bois called this the “psychological wage.” The wealthy barons running the country knew that if working-class white folks ever realized they were getting squeezed just like Black folks, the game would be over. So they offered poor white workers a counterfeit deal: We’ll pay you lousy wages, work you to the bone in the mills, send you off to fight our wars, and give you zero safety net. But in exchange, we will give you a white skin—which means you will never be at the bottom.
It was a distraction. It convinced generations of working families to fight against their own interests—to oppose strong labor unions, to fight against universal healthcare, and to accept crumbs from the table—just to hold onto the hollow bragging rights of being one step higher on a fake ladder.
Whiteness never made ordinary working-class families rich. It just kept them quiet.
The Six Defenses: How Everyday Denial Protects the Baseline
When you bring up the real history of Black achievement and the legal machinery built to hold it down, people rarely argue with the actual facts. Instead, their defenses usually fall into one of six familiar routines:
- The “Colorblind” Idealist: They love quoting Dr. King’s line about the “content of their character,” but they take it completely out of context. They want to act like race doesn’t exist now that their group has secured the wealth, the property, and the textbooks. Claiming not to “see color” just means demanding that everyone blend into the background—a background that is assumed to be white.
- The Zero-Sum Worrier: They honestly believe that there is only so much praise to go around. If a historian points out that a Black engineer invented a crucial component of the electric light bulb or the telephone, they don’t hear a cool historical fact; they feel like something is being stolen from their heritage.
- The Heritage Defender: This is usually the loudest, angriest group. Their entire identity is built on the idea that the traditional heroes were flawless and that their status was 100% earned by hard work alone. Admitting that Black communities were deliberately held back through state violence and redlining hurts too much, because it means the playing field was never fair. They attack the history to protect their own ego.
- The Clean-Hands Immigrant: They confuse the cause of a system with who benefits from it. Sure, your great-grandfather might have arrived from Italy or Ireland in 1910 with ten cents in his pocket. but eventually when the numbers were getting thin, he was handed a legal ticket to the “white” club. That ticket let his kids buy homes in suburbs with restrictive deeds and join trade unions that locked Black workers out for generations. You don’t have to have built the system to have cashed its checks.
- The Tone Police: They love celebrating the triumphs, but they hate hearing about the crimes. They will happily cheer for George Washington Carver making things from peanuts, but don’t you dare mention the brutal sharecropping system that kept Black farmers in South Carolina and Alabama living in virtual debt slavery. They want Black history to sound like a polite thank-you note.
- The Skeptical Fact-Checker: We teach kids that Thomas Edison single-handedly invented the light bulb and Henry Ford invented the car, completely ignoring the armies of mechanics and assistants doing the actual work. But the second you mention a Black innovator, this person suddenly turns into a hard-nosed patent attorney, looking for any excuse to downgrade the accomplishment to “just an improvement.”
Different words, different tones. But the goal is identical: keep the real map rolled up so nobody sees the true dimensions.
The Historical Precedent: The Great Chain of Being and the Valladolid Debate
This mindset didn’t start with social media, and it didn’t start in America. It goes back more than five hundred years to an old European idea called the Great Chain of Being.
Back in the Middle Ages, thinkers adapted ideas from Aristotle and Christian scholars like Thomas Aquinas to argue that the entire universe was arranged in a strict, vertical ladder designed by God:
In its original medieval formulation, all human beings were on the exact same human step. A king might be treated better than a peasant, but nobody argued that peasants weren’t human beings with souls.
Everything changed in the early 1500s.
When Spanish and Portuguese ships started sailing down the coast of West Africa and over to the Americas, European crowns ran into millions of people they didn’t know existed. The empires wanted gold, silver, and massive cash crops. But their own religion created a problem: if every human being is on the same step on God’s ladder, by what lawful could Christian crowns take their land, and force them to work until they drop?
The answer was simple and brutal: It was not to dismantle the Chain of Being, but to sever the brown and black from the human rung of the ladder.
This came out in the open in 1550 at the famous Valladolid Debate at the Colegio de San Gregorioin Spain. King Charles V ordered a formal hearing to decide a straightforward question: Did Spain have the right to wage war on and conquer native peoples before even trying to convert them to Christianity?
A famous royal scholar named Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda,an eminent humanist scholar and royal court classicist who had never crossed the Atlantic, argued that the answer was yes. Leaning on Aristotle’s doctrine of “natural slavery”, he claimed that some people are born to be masters, and some are born “natural slaves.” Sepúlveda argued that hierarchy was the absolute law of nature: the mind rules the body, the male rules the female, and the civilized rules the barbarian. He claimed that Indigenous Americans lacked fully developed rational souls, declaring them servi a natura (natural slaves). Subjugating them by force was framed not as an act of theft, but as an act of paternal correction required by natural law.
On the other side stood Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who had spent decades living in the Americas. Las Casas mounted an uncompromising defense of universal human dignity, declaring famously before the court: “All the peoples of the world are men.” He methodically demonstrated that Indigenous nations possessed lawful sovereignty, advanced civil governance, sophisticated urban centers, and coherent legal codes. To wage war against them was not a holy mission; it was unprovoked, tyrannical robbery.
Las Casas made an incredible defense. But in his early years, desperate to stop the slaughter of the Native Americans, he made a catastrophic suggestion: he advised the Spanish Crown to import enslaved Africans instead.
At the time, Las Casas bought into the self-serving Portuguese excuse that African captives were captured in “fair wars” under local laws, and he swallowed the myth that African workers were naturally suited for hard labor in the heat.
Years later, Las Casas sat down to do the real research for his history of the Americas, and he read the firsthand journals of the Portuguese slave traders. He read accounts of Portuguese ships raiding peaceful villages at night, setting huts on fire, and snatching crying babies from their mothers on the beaches of West Africa.
The realization wrecked him.
In his classic book, History of the Indies, Las Casas gave one of the most honest apologies ever written by a public figure. He wrote that enslaving Black people was just as wicked, unjust, and tyrannical as enslaving Native Americans, and that claiming he “didn’t know any better” at the time wouldn’t save him on Judgment Day. He warned that Spain would eventually pay a terrible price for building its empire on human misery.
His warning was ignored. The economic machine was too profitable to stop. By the 1700s, European scientists dropped the church language, kept the ladder, and called it “science”—drawing charts that placed Europeans at the very top of the human family and everyone else on lower rungs descending toward the apes.
The Accurate Measure: Drawing the World to Scale
Connect the dots across five hundred years, and modern cultural defensiveness suddenly makes total sense.
The person who gets irritated when you talk about Black excellence, the school board that bans books about the real history of slavery and Jim Crow, and the American diplomat who sits at the UN voting against an accurate map of the globe are all dealing with the same basic fear: the panic of not being the center of everything anymore.
The architecture of whiteness was never built to share the stage as an equal partner. It was designed from day one to be the default, the top of the ladder, the biggest thing on the page. It has to keep the scale distorted, because if people see the real measurements, the illusion of effortless, natural dominance vanishes.
When we share the real history of Black culture, uncover the brilliant minds who were written out of the textbooks, and explain the paper trail of how wealth was moved from one community to another, we aren’t picking a fight. We’re just updating the map. We’re taking down the distorted projection and showing the world as it actually is.
Dropping the fake map isn’t an attack on anyone. It is civic duty.
The defense of this five-hundred-year-old hierarchy keeps everyone exhausted, financially insecure, and locked in a manufactured state of scarcity.. When we retire the distorted Mercator projection of our history and our economy, the powerful are terrified because their monopoly is exposed. But the vast majority of human beings—Black, brown, and white—stand only to gain.
An accurate map does not shrink the world; it simply shows the world as it actually is. And an accurate accounting of power does not rob ordinary people of their heritage; it frees them from paying interest on a debt they never owed, in defense of a system that was never built to love them back.
Yet as real as this psychological pushback is, hurt feelings alone don’t explain why state legislatures pass massive laws to block Black progress today. Annoyed comments are just the smoke; they aren’t the fire.
Old ideas have a way of finding lawyers, and ladders of supremacy have a way of turning into actual property deeds.
In Part 2, we’re going to leave the psychology behind and look at the money and the land. We’ll go to a wooden closing table in Denmark, South Carolina, where an explicit racial clause typed into a house deed shows that this isn’t just about pride—it’s about property. And we’ll look at the cold, hard numbers that explain why the establishment fights Black progress today not out of a bad mood, but out of total panic over who actually owns the wealth of this country.
Glossary of Terms
- Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566): Early Spanish Dominican friar, historian, and social reformer who served as the first resident Bishop of Chiapas and was officially appointed “Protector of the Indians.” While initially advocating for importing African laborers to spare indigenous populations, he later famously recanted in his Historia de las Indias, equating the immorality of African enslavement to Indigenous subjugation.
- Cognitive Justice: A human rights and epistemological framework asserting the right of diverse knowledge systems, cultural narratives, and spatial representations to coexist without being subordinated by dominant imperial canons.
- Equal-Area Projection: A mathematical cartographic method (such as the Gall-Peters, Hobo-Dyer, or Equal Earth projections) that preserves the proportional area of all geographic regions relative to one another, preventing the visual distortion that inflates subpolar regions and shrinks equatorial continents.
- Great Chain of Being (Scala Naturae): A classical Greek and medieval theological concept asserting that all matter and life exist on a continuous, rigid, divinely ordained vertical hierarchy descending from God and angels down through humanity, animals, plants, and minerals.
- Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573): Spanish humanist, philosopher, and royal court chronicler who argued at the Valladolid Debate that Indigenous Americans were “natural slaves” (servi a natura) under Aristotelian natural law, thereby justifying military conquest and forced labor.
- Mercator Projection: A conformal, cylindrical map projection developed in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator. Engineered strictly for marine compass navigation (rhumb lines), it significantly distorts geographic area as latitude increases toward the poles, artificially exaggerating North America and Europe while drastically shrinking Africa and South America.
- Psychological Wage: A socio-economic term coined by civil rights scholar W.E.B. Du Bois in 1935 describing the non-monetary, social status granted to working-class white laborers by the ruling elite. This artificial status served to placate white workers with social superiority over Black laborers, actively discouraging interracial labor solidarity.
- Valladolid Debate (1550–1551): The first formal moral and philosophical council convened in early modern Europe (at the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid, Spain) by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to deliberate whether European crowns had the legal and divine right to conquer, enslave, and evangelize Indigenous peoples by force.
- Whiteness (Systemic/Legal): An engineered statutory caste and property status first codified in the late 17th-century American colonial legal codes to separate European laborers from enslaved Africans, establish legal immunity from chattel slavery, and limit the rights of property ownership, civic participation, and citizenship to designated European lineages.
Bibliography
- Aristotle.Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885. (Specifically Book I, Chapters 3–7, outlining the classical doctrine of “natural slavery”).
- Du Bois, W.E.B.Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in North America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. (Foundational source for the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness).
- Hanke, Lewis.All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the Religious and Intellectual Capacity of the American Indians. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974.
- Las Casas, Bartolomé de.History of the Indies (Historia de las Indias). Translated and edited by Andrée M. Collard. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. (Specifically Book III, Chapter 129, detailing his moral recantation regarding the transatlantic trade in African captives).
- Lovejoy, Arthur O.The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936.
- Monmonier, Mark.Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
- Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de.Democrates Alter, sive de justis belli causis apud Indos (Treatise on the Just Causes of War Against the Indians). Edited and translated by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. Madrid: Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, 1892 (originally drafted ca. 1545).
- United Nations General Assembly.Official Records of the General Assembly: Explanation of Vote on the “Correct the Map” Initiative. New York: United Nations Document Records, 2026.
- Zurara, Gomes Eanes de.The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea (Crónica dos Feitos da Guiné). Translated by Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage. London: Hakluyt Society, 1896 (originally compiled ca. 1453).
-
The Mercator Mindset: Why the Truth Feels Like an Attack
Table of Contents
- The Global Map, the Lone Dissent, and the Reflex of Scale
- The Three Excuses: How the Establishment Changes the Subject
- The Operating System: The Architecture and the Fool’s Gold
- The Six Defenses: How Everyday Denial Protects the Baseline
- The Historical Precedent: The Great Chain of Being and the Valladolid Debate
- The Accurate Measure: Drawing the World to Scale
Part 1: The Global Map, the Lone Dissent, and the Reflex of Scale
Not long ago at the United Nations, a resolution came up regarding global human rights and the need to finally condemn the lasting damage done by colonialism and racial discrimination. When the votes went up on the big board, the outcome was hard to miss: almost every country on earth voted yes, while the United States stood in a tiny, stubborn minority alongside Israel and Argentina.
Shortly after, an even stranger vote happened. The UN took up an initiative called “Correct the Map,” pushed by African nations to stop using the traditional 1569 Mercator world map in schools and official international business, replacing it with maps that actually show the true sizes of the continents. The vote wasn’t even close: 164 countries voted in favor, six abstained, and exactly one country voted no.
The United States stood entirely alone.
Think about how wild that is for a second. The Mercator map was drawn back in the 1500s by a European mapmaker named Gerardus Mercator. He wasn’t making a classroom teaching tool; he was making a navigation chart for European sailors steering ships by compass. To flatten a spherical earth onto a flat sheet of paper, it drastically distorts landmasses the farther they sit from the equator.
The result? Greenland looks as big as the entire continent of Africa, even though Africa is actually fourteen times bigger. North America looks like a giant hovering over Africa and South America. In real life, Africa is so massive it could easily swallow the contiguous United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe with room left over.
Every modern satellite photo and GPS calculation confirms the old map is a flat-out lie of scale.
Yet, when asked to officially agree on a map that shows the physical earth as it actually exists, the United States dug in its heels and voted “no.”
Why? Because a map is never just a piece of paper. It’s a mirror. If you grow up with a classroom map where your part of the world is drawn twice as big as it really is and sits right in the dead center, you absorb a silent, lifelong lesson: We are naturally larger, naturally more important, and naturally running the show.
Agreeing to an accurate map feels like being shrunk down. It forces an empire to look in the mirror and see itself drawn to scale. And when power is forced to see itself as just one part of the world instead of the center of it, the immediate reaction isn’t humility. It’s irritation.
That exact same irritation plays out in everyday American life.
Whenever writers, historians, or everyday folks highlight the genius of Black inventors, point out how Black neighborhoods were bulldozed to build highways, or explain how modern banks still shortchange Black communities, the pushback from a lot of white readers isn’t thoughtful curiosity. It’s an immediate, defensive eye-roll.
The comments always sound the same: Why does everything have to be about race? Why can’t we just be Americans? If we had a White History Month, you’d call it racist! My family didn’t own slaves, so why are you trying to make me feel guilty?
It’s easy to write this off as bad manners, online trolling, or simple prejudice. But it goes way deeper than that. That irritation is an involuntary reflex. It’s what happens when someone who has lived inside a comfortable, flattering version of history suddenly realizes someone has walked in with truth.
Talking honestly about Black brilliance and Black survival—not as charity cases, but as people who built this country and out-innovated the barriers placed in front of them—threatens the map people have carried in their heads their whole lives.
The Three Excuses: How the Establishment Changes the Subject
When the US voted against the accurate map at the UN, its diplomats gave three official explanations. On paper, they sounded calm and practical. In reality, they are the exact same playbooks people use at the dinner table or online to shut down honest conversations about race.
1. The Vocabulary Trap: The US claimed the map resolution was a “radical ideological project” driven by political correctness, simply because the African sponsors called an accurate map an act of “cognitive justice and memorial repair.” Notice what happened there: instead of arguing about whether the map was scientifically accurate, Washington attacked the words being used. It’s the oldest trick in the book: when you can’t deny the facts, attack the tone of the person pointing them out.
2. “There Are Bigger Things to Worry About”: The American delegation called the vote “superfluous” and a distraction, calling resolutions like it “barnacles” that waste the UN’s time when there are wars to stop and economies to fix. But this is just an excuse to kick the can down the road. If updating the classroom map was really such a trivial little thing, why did the US spend the political capital to stand alone against 164 nations? You don’t fight the entire planet over something you think doesn’t matter.
3. Hiding Behind “Neutrality”: The US argued that the old map is just a practical mathematical tool for navigation and GPS, and that politics shouldn’t pick which map to use. It pretends the status quo is completely neutral. But a map that has taught five hundred years of schoolkids to view the Global South as tiny isn’t “just math.” It’s an ideological habit masquerading as common sense.
The Operating System: The Architecture and the Fool’s Gold
Before we go any further, let’s get something straight: When I write about whiteness, I am not writing about you as an individual.
I’m not sitting in judgment of your character, your parents, or your soul. Human beings have actual cultures, distinct heritages, and rich family traditions. You might be Italian, Irish, German, Polish, Appalachian, or Jewish. Those backgrounds have real history—full of hard work, struggle, beautiful music, and survival.
Whiteness is none of those things. Whiteness isn’t a culture. It isn’t an ethnicity.
Whiteness is a legal system. It was invented in the legal codes of the American colonies in the late 1600s for a very specific business reason: wealthy plantation owners realized that if poor European servants and enslaved African laborers realized they had the same economic enemies and teamed up, the elites would lose their shirts. So they drew a legal line. They created a new legal club called “white” and gave it exclusive rights: the right to own land, the right to vote, and the guarantee that your body would never be sold at an auction block.
Critiquing that broken foundation isn’t an attack on the people living in the house; it’s the only way to fix the house before the whole thing caves in.
Here’s the dirty little secret that the defenders of this setup never want to admit: Whiteness has always been fool’s gold for ordinary white working people.
Back in the 1930s, the great thinker W.E.B. Du Bois called this the “psychological wage.” The wealthy barons running the country knew that if working-class white folks ever realized they were getting squeezed just like Black folks, the game would be over. So they offered poor white workers a counterfeit deal: We’ll pay you lousy wages, work you to the bone in the mills, send you off to fight our wars, and give you zero safety net. But in exchange, we will give you a white skin—which means you will never be at the bottom.
It was a distraction. It convinced generations of working families to fight against their own interests—to oppose strong labor unions, to fight against universal healthcare, and to accept crumbs from the table—just to hold onto the hollow bragging rights of being one step higher on a fake ladder.
Whiteness never made ordinary working-class families rich. It just kept them quiet.
The Six Defenses: How Everyday Denial Protects the Baseline
When you bring up the real history of Black achievement and the legal machinery built to hold it down, people rarely argue with the actual facts. Instead, their defenses usually fall into one of six familiar routines:
- The “Colorblind” Idealist: They love quoting Dr. King’s line about the “content of their character,” but they take it completely out of context. They want to act like race doesn’t exist now that their group has secured the wealth, the property, and the textbooks. Claiming not to “see color” just means demanding that everyone blend into the background—a background that is assumed to be white.
- The Zero-Sum Worrier: They honestly believe that there is only so much praise to go around. If a historian points out that a Black engineer invented a crucial component of the electric light bulb or the telephone, they don’t hear a cool historical fact; they feel like something is being stolen from their heritage.
- The Heritage Defender: This is usually the loudest, angriest group. Their entire identity is built on the idea that the traditional heroes were flawless and that their status was 100% earned by hard work alone. Admitting that Black communities were deliberately held back through state violence and redlining hurts too much, because it means the playing field was never fair. They attack the history to protect their own ego.
- The Clean-Hands Immigrant: They confuse the cause of a system with who benefits from it. Sure, your great-grandfather might have arrived from Italy or Ireland in 1910 with ten cents in his pocket. but eventually when the numbers were getting thin, he was handed a legal ticket to the “white” club. That ticket let his kids buy homes in suburbs with restrictive deeds and join trade unions that locked Black workers out for generations. You don’t have to have built the system to have cashed its checks.
- The Tone Police: They love celebrating the triumphs, but they hate hearing about the crimes. They will happily cheer for George Washington Carver making things from peanuts, but don’t you dare mention the brutal sharecropping system that kept Black farmers in South Carolina and Alabama living in virtual debt slavery. They want Black history to sound like a polite thank-you note.
- The Skeptical Fact-Checker: We teach kids that Thomas Edison single-handedly invented the light bulb and Henry Ford invented the car, completely ignoring the armies of mechanics and assistants doing the actual work. But the second you mention a Black innovator, this person suddenly turns into a hard-nosed patent attorney, looking for any excuse to downgrade the accomplishment to “just an improvement.”
Different words, different tones. But the goal is identical: keep the real map rolled up so nobody sees the true dimensions.
The Historical Precedent: The Great Chain of Being and the Valladolid Debate
This mindset didn’t start with social media, and it didn’t start in America. It goes back more than five hundred years to an old European idea called the Great Chain of Being.
Back in the Middle Ages, thinkers adapted ideas from Aristotle and Christian scholars like Thomas Aquinas to argue that the entire universe was arranged in a strict, vertical ladder designed by God:
In its original medieval formulation, all human beings were on the exact same human step. A king might be treated better than a peasant, but nobody argued that peasants weren’t human beings with souls.
Everything changed in the early 1500s.
When Spanish and Portuguese ships started sailing down the coast of West Africa and over to the Americas, European crowns ran into millions of people they didn’t know existed. The empires wanted gold, silver, and massive cash crops. But their own religion created a problem: if every human being is on the same step on God’s ladder, by what lawful could Christian crowns take their land, and force them to work until they drop?
The answer was simple and brutal: It was not to dismantle the Chain of Being, but to sever the brown and black from the human rung of the ladder.
This came out in the open in 1550 at the famous Valladolid Debate at the Colegio de San Gregorioin Spain. King Charles V ordered a formal hearing to decide a straightforward question: Did Spain have the right to wage war on and conquer native peoples before even trying to convert them to Christianity?
A famous royal scholar named Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda,an eminent humanist scholar and royal court classicist who had never crossed the Atlantic, argued that the answer was yes. Leaning on Aristotle’s doctrine of “natural slavery”, he claimed that some people are born to be masters, and some are born “natural slaves.” Sepúlveda argued that hierarchy was the absolute law of nature: the mind rules the body, the male rules the female, and the civilized rules the barbarian. He claimed that Indigenous Americans lacked fully developed rational souls, declaring them servi a natura (natural slaves). Subjugating them by force was framed not as an act of theft, but as an act of paternal correction required by natural law.
On the other side stood Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who had spent decades living in the Americas. Las Casas mounted an uncompromising defense of universal human dignity, declaring famously before the court: “All the peoples of the world are men.” He methodically demonstrated that Indigenous nations possessed lawful sovereignty, advanced civil governance, sophisticated urban centers, and coherent legal codes. To wage war against them was not a holy mission; it was unprovoked, tyrannical robbery.
Las Casas made an incredible defense. But in his early years, desperate to stop the slaughter of the Native Americans, he made a catastrophic suggestion: he advised the Spanish Crown to import enslaved Africans instead.
At the time, Las Casas bought into the self-serving Portuguese excuse that African captives were captured in “fair wars” under local laws, and he swallowed the myth that African workers were naturally suited for hard labor in the heat.
Years later, Las Casas sat down to do the real research for his history of the Americas, and he read the firsthand journals of the Portuguese slave traders. He read accounts of Portuguese ships raiding peaceful villages at night, setting huts on fire, and snatching crying babies from their mothers on the beaches of West Africa.
The realization wrecked him.
In his classic book, History of the Indies, Las Casas gave one of the most honest apologies ever written by a public figure. He wrote that enslaving Black people was just as wicked, unjust, and tyrannical as enslaving Native Americans, and that claiming he “didn’t know any better” at the time wouldn’t save him on Judgment Day. He warned that Spain would eventually pay a terrible price for building its empire on human misery.
His warning was ignored. The economic machine was too profitable to stop. By the 1700s, European scientists dropped the church language, kept the ladder, and called it “science”—drawing charts that placed Europeans at the very top of the human family and everyone else on lower rungs descending toward the apes.
The Accurate Measure: Drawing the World to Scale
Connect the dots across five hundred years, and modern cultural defensiveness suddenly makes total sense.
The person who gets irritated when you talk about Black excellence, the school board that bans books about the real history of slavery and Jim Crow, and the American diplomat who sits at the UN voting against an accurate map of the globe are all dealing with the same basic fear: the panic of not being the center of everything anymore.
The architecture of whiteness was never built to share the stage as an equal partner. It was designed from day one to be the default, the top of the ladder, the biggest thing on the page. It has to keep the scale distorted, because if people see the real measurements, the illusion of effortless, natural dominance vanishes.
When we share the real history of Black culture, uncover the brilliant minds who were written out of the textbooks, and explain the paper trail of how wealth was moved from one community to another, we aren’t picking a fight. We’re just updating the map. We’re taking down the distorted projection and showing the world as it actually is.
Dropping the fake map isn’t an attack on anyone. It is civic duty.
The defense of this five-hundred-year-old hierarchy keeps everyone exhausted, financially insecure, and locked in a manufactured state of scarcity.. When we retire the distorted Mercator projection of our history and our economy, the powerful are terrified because their monopoly is exposed. But the vast majority of human beings—Black, brown, and white—stand only to gain.
An accurate map does not shrink the world; it simply shows the world as it actually is. And an accurate accounting of power does not rob ordinary people of their heritage; it frees them from paying interest on a debt they never owed, in defense of a system that was never built to love them back.
Yet as real as this psychological pushback is, hurt feelings alone don’t explain why state legislatures pass massive laws to block Black progress today. Annoyed comments are just the smoke; they aren’t the fire.
Old ideas have a way of finding lawyers, and ladders of supremacy have a way of turning into actual property deeds.
In Part 2, we’re going to leave the psychology behind and look at the money and the land. We’ll go to a wooden closing table in Denmark, South Carolina, where an explicit racial clause typed into a house deed shows that this isn’t just about pride—it’s about property. And we’ll look at the cold, hard numbers that explain why the establishment fights Black progress today not out of a bad mood, but out of total panic over who actually owns the wealth of this country.
Glossary of Terms
- Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566): Early Spanish Dominican friar, historian, and social reformer who served as the first resident Bishop of Chiapas and was officially appointed “Protector of the Indians.” While initially advocating for importing African laborers to spare indigenous populations, he later famously recanted in his Historia de las Indias, equating the immorality of African enslavement to Indigenous subjugation.
- Cognitive Justice: A human rights and epistemological framework asserting the right of diverse knowledge systems, cultural narratives, and spatial representations to coexist without being subordinated by dominant imperial canons.
- Equal-Area Projection: A mathematical cartographic method (such as the Gall-Peters, Hobo-Dyer, or Equal Earth projections) that preserves the proportional area of all geographic regions relative to one another, preventing the visual distortion that inflates subpolar regions and shrinks equatorial continents.
- Great Chain of Being (Scala Naturae): A classical Greek and medieval theological concept asserting that all matter and life exist on a continuous, rigid, divinely ordained vertical hierarchy descending from God and angels down through humanity, animals, plants, and minerals.
- Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573): Spanish humanist, philosopher, and royal court chronicler who argued at the Valladolid Debate that Indigenous Americans were “natural slaves” (servi a natura) under Aristotelian natural law, thereby justifying military conquest and forced labor.
- Mercator Projection: A conformal, cylindrical map projection developed in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator. Engineered strictly for marine compass navigation (rhumb lines), it significantly distorts geographic area as latitude increases toward the poles, artificially exaggerating North America and Europe while drastically shrinking Africa and South America.
- Psychological Wage: A socio-economic term coined by civil rights scholar W.E.B. Du Bois in 1935 describing the non-monetary, social status granted to working-class white laborers by the ruling elite. This artificial status served to placate white workers with social superiority over Black laborers, actively discouraging interracial labor solidarity.
- Valladolid Debate (1550–1551): The first formal moral and philosophical council convened in early modern Europe (at the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid, Spain) by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to deliberate whether European crowns had the legal and divine right to conquer, enslave, and evangelize Indigenous peoples by force.
- Whiteness (Systemic/Legal): An engineered statutory caste and property status first codified in the late 17th-century American colonial legal codes to separate European laborers from enslaved Africans, establish legal immunity from chattel slavery, and limit the rights of property ownership, civic participation, and citizenship to designated European lineages.
Bibliography
- Aristotle.Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885. (Specifically Book I, Chapters 3–7, outlining the classical doctrine of “natural slavery”).
- Du Bois, W.E.B.Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in North America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. (Foundational source for the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness).
- Hanke, Lewis.All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the Religious and Intellectual Capacity of the American Indians. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974.
- Las Casas, Bartolomé de.History of the Indies (Historia de las Indias). Translated and edited by Andrée M. Collard. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. (Specifically Book III, Chapter 129, detailing his moral recantation regarding the transatlantic trade in African captives).
- Lovejoy, Arthur O.The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936.
- Monmonier, Mark.Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
- Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de.Democrates Alter, sive de justis belli causis apud Indos (Treatise on the Just Causes of War Against the Indians). Edited and translated by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. Madrid: Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, 1892 (originally drafted ca. 1545).
- United Nations General Assembly.Official Records of the General Assembly: Explanation of Vote on the “Correct the Map” Initiative. New York: United Nations Document Records, 2026.
- Zurara, Gomes Eanes de.The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea (Crónica dos Feitos da Guiné). Translated by Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage. London: Hakluyt Society, 1896 (originally compiled ca. 1453).
-
The Mercator Mindset: Why the Truth Feels Like an Attack
Table of Contents
- The Global Map, the Lone Dissent, and the Reflex of Scale
- The Three Excuses: How the Establishment Changes the Subject
- The Operating System: The Architecture and the Fool’s Gold
- The Six Defenses: How Everyday Denial Protects the Baseline
- The Historical Precedent: The Great Chain of Being and the Valladolid Debate
- The Accurate Measure: Drawing the World to Scale
Part 1: The Global Map, the Lone Dissent, and the Reflex of Scale
Not long ago at the United Nations, a resolution came up regarding global human rights and the need to finally condemn the lasting damage done by colonialism and racial discrimination. When the votes went up on the big board, the outcome was hard to miss: almost every country on earth voted yes, while the United States stood in a tiny, stubborn minority alongside Israel and Argentina.
Shortly after, an even stranger vote happened. The UN took up an initiative called “Correct the Map,” pushed by African nations to stop using the traditional 1569 Mercator world map in schools and official international business, replacing it with maps that actually show the true sizes of the continents. The vote wasn’t even close: 164 countries voted in favor, six abstained, and exactly one country voted no.
The United States stood entirely alone.
Think about how wild that is for a second. The Mercator map was drawn back in the 1500s by a European mapmaker named Gerardus Mercator. He wasn’t making a classroom teaching tool; he was making a navigation chart for European sailors steering ships by compass. To flatten a spherical earth onto a flat sheet of paper, it drastically distorts landmasses the farther they sit from the equator.
The result? Greenland looks as big as the entire continent of Africa, even though Africa is actually fourteen times bigger. North America looks like a giant hovering over Africa and South America. In real life, Africa is so massive it could easily swallow the contiguous United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe with room left over.
Every modern satellite photo and GPS calculation confirms the old map is a flat-out lie of scale.
Yet, when asked to officially agree on a map that shows the physical earth as it actually exists, the United States dug in its heels and voted “no.”
Why? Because a map is never just a piece of paper. It’s a mirror. If you grow up with a classroom map where your part of the world is drawn twice as big as it really is and sits right in the dead center, you absorb a silent, lifelong lesson: We are naturally larger, naturally more important, and naturally running the show.
Agreeing to an accurate map feels like being shrunk down. It forces an empire to look in the mirror and see itself drawn to scale. And when power is forced to see itself as just one part of the world instead of the center of it, the immediate reaction isn’t humility. It’s irritation.
That exact same irritation plays out in everyday American life.
Whenever writers, historians, or everyday folks highlight the genius of Black inventors, point out how Black neighborhoods were bulldozed to build highways, or explain how modern banks still shortchange Black communities, the pushback from a lot of white readers isn’t thoughtful curiosity. It’s an immediate, defensive eye-roll.
The comments always sound the same: Why does everything have to be about race? Why can’t we just be Americans? If we had a White History Month, you’d call it racist! My family didn’t own slaves, so why are you trying to make me feel guilty?
It’s easy to write this off as bad manners, online trolling, or simple prejudice. But it goes way deeper than that. That irritation is an involuntary reflex. It’s what happens when someone who has lived inside a comfortable, flattering version of history suddenly realizes someone has walked in with truth.
Talking honestly about Black brilliance and Black survival—not as charity cases, but as people who built this country and out-innovated the barriers placed in front of them—threatens the map people have carried in their heads their whole lives.
The Three Excuses: How the Establishment Changes the Subject
When the US voted against the accurate map at the UN, its diplomats gave three official explanations. On paper, they sounded calm and practical. In reality, they are the exact same playbooks people use at the dinner table or online to shut down honest conversations about race.
1. The Vocabulary Trap: The US claimed the map resolution was a “radical ideological project” driven by political correctness, simply because the African sponsors called an accurate map an act of “cognitive justice and memorial repair.” Notice what happened there: instead of arguing about whether the map was scientifically accurate, Washington attacked the words being used. It’s the oldest trick in the book: when you can’t deny the facts, attack the tone of the person pointing them out.
2. “There Are Bigger Things to Worry About”: The American delegation called the vote “superfluous” and a distraction, calling resolutions like it “barnacles” that waste the UN’s time when there are wars to stop and economies to fix. But this is just an excuse to kick the can down the road. If updating the classroom map was really such a trivial little thing, why did the US spend the political capital to stand alone against 164 nations? You don’t fight the entire planet over something you think doesn’t matter.
3. Hiding Behind “Neutrality”: The US argued that the old map is just a practical mathematical tool for navigation and GPS, and that politics shouldn’t pick which map to use. It pretends the status quo is completely neutral. But a map that has taught five hundred years of schoolkids to view the Global South as tiny isn’t “just math.” It’s an ideological habit masquerading as common sense.
The Operating System: The Architecture and the Fool’s Gold
Before we go any further, let’s get something straight: When I write about whiteness, I am not writing about you as an individual.
I’m not sitting in judgment of your character, your parents, or your soul. Human beings have actual cultures, distinct heritages, and rich family traditions. You might be Italian, Irish, German, Polish, Appalachian, or Jewish. Those backgrounds have real history—full of hard work, struggle, beautiful music, and survival.
Whiteness is none of those things. Whiteness isn’t a culture. It isn’t an ethnicity.
Whiteness is a legal system. It was invented in the legal codes of the American colonies in the late 1600s for a very specific business reason: wealthy plantation owners realized that if poor European servants and enslaved African laborers realized they had the same economic enemies and teamed up, the elites would lose their shirts. So they drew a legal line. They created a new legal club called “white” and gave it exclusive rights: the right to own land, the right to vote, and the guarantee that your body would never be sold at an auction block.
Critiquing that broken foundation isn’t an attack on the people living in the house; it’s the only way to fix the house before the whole thing caves in.
Here’s the dirty little secret that the defenders of this setup never want to admit: Whiteness has always been fool’s gold for ordinary white working people.
Back in the 1930s, the great thinker W.E.B. Du Bois called this the “psychological wage.” The wealthy barons running the country knew that if working-class white folks ever realized they were getting squeezed just like Black folks, the game would be over. So they offered poor white workers a counterfeit deal: We’ll pay you lousy wages, work you to the bone in the mills, send you off to fight our wars, and give you zero safety net. But in exchange, we will give you a white skin—which means you will never be at the bottom.
It was a distraction. It convinced generations of working families to fight against their own interests—to oppose strong labor unions, to fight against universal healthcare, and to accept crumbs from the table—just to hold onto the hollow bragging rights of being one step higher on a fake ladder.
Whiteness never made ordinary working-class families rich. It just kept them quiet.
The Six Defenses: How Everyday Denial Protects the Baseline
When you bring up the real history of Black achievement and the legal machinery built to hold it down, people rarely argue with the actual facts. Instead, their defenses usually fall into one of six familiar routines:
- The “Colorblind” Idealist: They love quoting Dr. King’s line about the “content of their character,” but they take it completely out of context. They want to act like race doesn’t exist now that their group has secured the wealth, the property, and the textbooks. Claiming not to “see color” just means demanding that everyone blend into the background—a background that is assumed to be white.
- The Zero-Sum Worrier: They honestly believe that there is only so much praise to go around. If a historian points out that a Black engineer invented a crucial component of the electric light bulb or the telephone, they don’t hear a cool historical fact; they feel like something is being stolen from their heritage.
- The Heritage Defender: This is usually the loudest, angriest group. Their entire identity is built on the idea that the traditional heroes were flawless and that their status was 100% earned by hard work alone. Admitting that Black communities were deliberately held back through state violence and redlining hurts too much, because it means the playing field was never fair. They attack the history to protect their own ego.
- The Clean-Hands Immigrant: They confuse the cause of a system with who benefits from it. Sure, your great-grandfather might have arrived from Italy or Ireland in 1910 with ten cents in his pocket. but eventually when the numbers were getting thin, he was handed a legal ticket to the “white” club. That ticket let his kids buy homes in suburbs with restrictive deeds and join trade unions that locked Black workers out for generations. You don’t have to have built the system to have cashed its checks.
- The Tone Police: They love celebrating the triumphs, but they hate hearing about the crimes. They will happily cheer for George Washington Carver making things from peanuts, but don’t you dare mention the brutal sharecropping system that kept Black farmers in South Carolina and Alabama living in virtual debt slavery. They want Black history to sound like a polite thank-you note.
- The Skeptical Fact-Checker: We teach kids that Thomas Edison single-handedly invented the light bulb and Henry Ford invented the car, completely ignoring the armies of mechanics and assistants doing the actual work. But the second you mention a Black innovator, this person suddenly turns into a hard-nosed patent attorney, looking for any excuse to downgrade the accomplishment to “just an improvement.”
Different words, different tones. But the goal is identical: keep the real map rolled up so nobody sees the true dimensions.
The Historical Precedent: The Great Chain of Being and the Valladolid Debate
This mindset didn’t start with social media, and it didn’t start in America. It goes back more than five hundred years to an old European idea called the Great Chain of Being.
Back in the Middle Ages, thinkers adapted ideas from Aristotle and Christian scholars like Thomas Aquinas to argue that the entire universe was arranged in a strict, vertical ladder designed by God:
In its original medieval formulation, all human beings were on the exact same human step. A king might be treated better than a peasant, but nobody argued that peasants weren’t human beings with souls.
Everything changed in the early 1500s.
When Spanish and Portuguese ships started sailing down the coast of West Africa and over to the Americas, European crowns ran into millions of people they didn’t know existed. The empires wanted gold, silver, and massive cash crops. But their own religion created a problem: if every human being is on the same step on God’s ladder, by what lawful could Christian crowns take their land, and force them to work until they drop?
The answer was simple and brutal: It was not to dismantle the Chain of Being, but to sever the brown and black from the human rung of the ladder.
This came out in the open in 1550 at the famous Valladolid Debate at the Colegio de San Gregorioin Spain. King Charles V ordered a formal hearing to decide a straightforward question: Did Spain have the right to wage war on and conquer native peoples before even trying to convert them to Christianity?
A famous royal scholar named Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda,an eminent humanist scholar and royal court classicist who had never crossed the Atlantic, argued that the answer was yes. Leaning on Aristotle’s doctrine of “natural slavery”, he claimed that some people are born to be masters, and some are born “natural slaves.” Sepúlveda argued that hierarchy was the absolute law of nature: the mind rules the body, the male rules the female, and the civilized rules the barbarian. He claimed that Indigenous Americans lacked fully developed rational souls, declaring them servi a natura (natural slaves). Subjugating them by force was framed not as an act of theft, but as an act of paternal correction required by natural law.
On the other side stood Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who had spent decades living in the Americas. Las Casas mounted an uncompromising defense of universal human dignity, declaring famously before the court: “All the peoples of the world are men.” He methodically demonstrated that Indigenous nations possessed lawful sovereignty, advanced civil governance, sophisticated urban centers, and coherent legal codes. To wage war against them was not a holy mission; it was unprovoked, tyrannical robbery.
Las Casas made an incredible defense. But in his early years, desperate to stop the slaughter of the Native Americans, he made a catastrophic suggestion: he advised the Spanish Crown to import enslaved Africans instead.
At the time, Las Casas bought into the self-serving Portuguese excuse that African captives were captured in “fair wars” under local laws, and he swallowed the myth that African workers were naturally suited for hard labor in the heat.
Years later, Las Casas sat down to do the real research for his history of the Americas, and he read the firsthand journals of the Portuguese slave traders. He read accounts of Portuguese ships raiding peaceful villages at night, setting huts on fire, and snatching crying babies from their mothers on the beaches of West Africa.
The realization wrecked him.
In his classic book, History of the Indies, Las Casas gave one of the most honest apologies ever written by a public figure. He wrote that enslaving Black people was just as wicked, unjust, and tyrannical as enslaving Native Americans, and that claiming he “didn’t know any better” at the time wouldn’t save him on Judgment Day. He warned that Spain would eventually pay a terrible price for building its empire on human misery.
His warning was ignored. The economic machine was too profitable to stop. By the 1700s, European scientists dropped the church language, kept the ladder, and called it “science”—drawing charts that placed Europeans at the very top of the human family and everyone else on lower rungs descending toward the apes.
The Accurate Measure: Drawing the World to Scale
Connect the dots across five hundred years, and modern cultural defensiveness suddenly makes total sense.
The person who gets irritated when you talk about Black excellence, the school board that bans books about the real history of slavery and Jim Crow, and the American diplomat who sits at the UN voting against an accurate map of the globe are all dealing with the same basic fear: the panic of not being the center of everything anymore.
The architecture of whiteness was never built to share the stage as an equal partner. It was designed from day one to be the default, the top of the ladder, the biggest thing on the page. It has to keep the scale distorted, because if people see the real measurements, the illusion of effortless, natural dominance vanishes.
When we share the real history of Black culture, uncover the brilliant minds who were written out of the textbooks, and explain the paper trail of how wealth was moved from one community to another, we aren’t picking a fight. We’re just updating the map. We’re taking down the distorted projection and showing the world as it actually is.
Dropping the fake map isn’t an attack on anyone. It is civic duty.
The defense of this five-hundred-year-old hierarchy keeps everyone exhausted, financially insecure, and locked in a manufactured state of scarcity.. When we retire the distorted Mercator projection of our history and our economy, the powerful are terrified because their monopoly is exposed. But the vast majority of human beings—Black, brown, and white—stand only to gain.
An accurate map does not shrink the world; it simply shows the world as it actually is. And an accurate accounting of power does not rob ordinary people of their heritage; it frees them from paying interest on a debt they never owed, in defense of a system that was never built to love them back.
Yet as real as this psychological pushback is, hurt feelings alone don’t explain why state legislatures pass massive laws to block Black progress today. Annoyed comments are just the smoke; they aren’t the fire.
Old ideas have a way of finding lawyers, and ladders of supremacy have a way of turning into actual property deeds.
In Part 2, we’re going to leave the psychology behind and look at the money and the land. We’ll go to a wooden closing table in Denmark, South Carolina, where an explicit racial clause typed into a house deed shows that this isn’t just about pride—it’s about property. And we’ll look at the cold, hard numbers that explain why the establishment fights Black progress today not out of a bad mood, but out of total panic over who actually owns the wealth of this country.
Glossary of Terms
- Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566): Early Spanish Dominican friar, historian, and social reformer who served as the first resident Bishop of Chiapas and was officially appointed “Protector of the Indians.” While initially advocating for importing African laborers to spare indigenous populations, he later famously recanted in his Historia de las Indias, equating the immorality of African enslavement to Indigenous subjugation.
- Cognitive Justice: A human rights and epistemological framework asserting the right of diverse knowledge systems, cultural narratives, and spatial representations to coexist without being subordinated by dominant imperial canons.
- Equal-Area Projection: A mathematical cartographic method (such as the Gall-Peters, Hobo-Dyer, or Equal Earth projections) that preserves the proportional area of all geographic regions relative to one another, preventing the visual distortion that inflates subpolar regions and shrinks equatorial continents.
- Great Chain of Being (Scala Naturae): A classical Greek and medieval theological concept asserting that all matter and life exist on a continuous, rigid, divinely ordained vertical hierarchy descending from God and angels down through humanity, animals, plants, and minerals.
- Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573): Spanish humanist, philosopher, and royal court chronicler who argued at the Valladolid Debate that Indigenous Americans were “natural slaves” (servi a natura) under Aristotelian natural law, thereby justifying military conquest and forced labor.
- Mercator Projection: A conformal, cylindrical map projection developed in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator. Engineered strictly for marine compass navigation (rhumb lines), it significantly distorts geographic area as latitude increases toward the poles, artificially exaggerating North America and Europe while drastically shrinking Africa and South America.
- Psychological Wage: A socio-economic term coined by civil rights scholar W.E.B. Du Bois in 1935 describing the non-monetary, social status granted to working-class white laborers by the ruling elite. This artificial status served to placate white workers with social superiority over Black laborers, actively discouraging interracial labor solidarity.
- Valladolid Debate (1550–1551): The first formal moral and philosophical council convened in early modern Europe (at the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid, Spain) by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to deliberate whether European crowns had the legal and divine right to conquer, enslave, and evangelize Indigenous peoples by force.
- Whiteness (Systemic/Legal): An engineered statutory caste and property status first codified in the late 17th-century American colonial legal codes to separate European laborers from enslaved Africans, establish legal immunity from chattel slavery, and limit the rights of property ownership, civic participation, and citizenship to designated European lineages.
Bibliography
- Aristotle.Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885. (Specifically Book I, Chapters 3–7, outlining the classical doctrine of “natural slavery”).
- Du Bois, W.E.B.Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in North America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. (Foundational source for the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness).
- Hanke, Lewis.All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the Religious and Intellectual Capacity of the American Indians. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974.
- Las Casas, Bartolomé de.History of the Indies (Historia de las Indias). Translated and edited by Andrée M. Collard. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. (Specifically Book III, Chapter 129, detailing his moral recantation regarding the transatlantic trade in African captives).
- Lovejoy, Arthur O.The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936.
- Monmonier, Mark.Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
- Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de.Democrates Alter, sive de justis belli causis apud Indos (Treatise on the Just Causes of War Against the Indians). Edited and translated by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. Madrid: Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, 1892 (originally drafted ca. 1545).
- United Nations General Assembly.Official Records of the General Assembly: Explanation of Vote on the “Correct the Map” Initiative. New York: United Nations Document Records, 2026.
- Zurara, Gomes Eanes de.The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea (Crónica dos Feitos da Guiné). Translated by Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage. London: Hakluyt Society, 1896 (originally compiled ca. 1453).
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Investing is Einstein’s Cat, or, The Thales Fallacy
This is a cat named Einstein not Einstein’s cat, but isn’t he gorgeous? You can see his person reflected in his eyes. Photo from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Einstein_(7996196819).jpgTwo or three thousand years ago, Indo-European speakers who had turned back at the Khyber Pass decided that some of the gods of their fathers, the daevas, were malevolent spirits.1 Their relatives in the Indus Valley disagreed and so the languages and religions diverted. Twenty or thirty years ago, I was growing up a science-fiction fan without ever having met one in person. From yellowing paperbacks and early websites I became a twentieth-century humanist well inoculated against some of the follies which clever young men are prone to. I did not know that in California the same movement was festering into something proudly un-democratic, full of longings for yesterday’s tomorrows and resentment that not everyone recognized them as the rightful rulers. I cannot stop them, that work is for people in the United States and UK. I cannot bridge that gap. But this month I can explain what is wrong with two of their core beliefs: that intelligence is the ability to predict the future, and that predicting the future leads to success.2 The story starts with Thales of Miletus and an olive-press, and ends with Albert Einstein and a cat carrier.
After this, seeing that Alyattes would not give up the Scythians to Cyaxares at his demand, there was war between the Lydians and the Medes for five years; each won many victories over the other, and once they fought a battle by night. They were still warring with equal success, when it chanced, at an encounter which happened during the sixth year, that during the battle the day was suddenly turned to night. Thales of Miletus had foretold this loss of daylight to the Ionians, fixing it within the year in which the change did indeed happen. So when the Lydians and Medes saw the day turned to night they ceased from fighting, and both were the more zealous to make peace.
Herodotus, Histories, 1.74 tr. A.d. GodleyThales of Miletus was one of the Seven Sages of Ionia, and later Greeks decided that he must have been good at predictions too. Herodotus told a story that he predicted a solar eclipse, and Aristotle taught his students that Thales used his wisdom to predict that the olive-harvest would be bountiful, and rented all the olive-presses in Miletus and Chios in advance (Politics 1.1259a). When the olives needed pressing, he could charge what he liked. Fun-ruining historians point out that not even Babylonians could predict a solar eclipse in the sixth century BCE, and the economy in Aristotle’s story looks much more like the world he lived in than the world Thales lived in.3 The Aegean around 600 BCE was not a place where everything had a price, but a place where landlords were proud that their neighbours had to come to them and beg to use their olive-presses or borrow some barley before the harvest. The important part of the story is that later generations believed that if Thales was wise he must have been able to use his wisdom to predict the future and get rich. If you can predict something in the natural world, like the movements of the planets, you can predict things in the world of markets and get rich. Anyone who flips through a news magazine or opens YouTube can find worshipful interviews with someone who made a successful prediction in the past. But when you ask the wisest and most mathematically qualified people in investing, they have a very different attitude towards predictions.
Forecasting is for losers
In the spring of 1971, I was about to become a newly minted Ph.D. in abstract, or ‘pure,’ mathematics. … Jobs that would have challenged and fascinated me were, for me, tainted because they only contributed to a war (in Vietnam) I didn’t believe in. … I … was offered a job (at a brokerage firm in Chicago). I thought, I don’t know anything about the stock market— I don’t even know what it is— but I may as well learn about it. Besides, I should easily be able to get rich using my knowledge of mathematics, and why not? … Little was I to know how many people I would meet over the years with the same idea, all of whom would be wrong.
Mathematics PhD, long-time finance-industry consultant, and sustainability expert Michael Edesess, The Big Investment Lie (2007) pp. 1-2One day a friend of my father-of the rich and confident variety- called me during his New York visit (to set the elements of pecking order straight, he hinted right away during the call that he came by Concorde, with some derogatory comments on the comfort of such methods of transportation). He wanted to pick my brain on the state of a collection of financial markets. I truly had no opinion, nor had made any effort to formulate any, nor was I remotely interested in markets. … I … did not make predictions, period.
Hedge-fund quant Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness (2004) pp. 102, 103The important turning points in markets are never identified with precision in advance by ‘experts’ and policymakers. This lack of foresight is not surprising, because markets and the course of the economy are not model-able scientific phenomena but rather are examples of mass human behavior, which are never predictable with anything like precision.
Hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, interview with Forbes, 20164But people don’t always want the best risk adjusted returns, sometimes people want to speculate … They want to express an informational belief, and who am I to say that’s wrong?
Certified Financial Planner Ben Felix, Rational Reminder podcast episode 201 (2022, automated transcript has not been verified)Most successful investors do not try to predict the future, except in the way you predict that it is more likely to be sunny in summer than winter and you are more likely to get the job if you apply for it. Markets are so unpredictable that it can take fifteen or twenty years to tell the difference between skill and luck. When people sit down to determine “Can Stock Market Forecasters Forecast?” they get the same answer as Alfred Cowles in 1933: no.5 The last century or so of investment history is dotted with unprecedented events, from the Russian Revolution to the decline of dividend yields in the 1950s to the Zero Interest-Rate Policy. You can learn to expect a sequence of booms and busts by studying the past, but not foresee these black swans which are only in the future. Moreover, you have to be able to survive the times that things do not happen the way you expect, as one 24-year-old investor found out. He was so confident that AI would let him buy entire galaxies like an E.E. “Doc” Smith character (and in the excellent grades he had received on standardized tests) that he did not worry that his stocks might fall in value in the short term.6 Rather than trying to guess the one thing which will happen, executives focus their thinking about the many things which might happen and how to survive each. So while being able to predict the future would be nice, there seems to be no reliable way to do it, except in the way an insurance company predicts about how many clients will make claims in the next fiscal year. Trying to do what almost no one can do is not not a good strategy.
Instead, the way to get and stay rich is to follow a few simple rules: save every month, invest it in a diversified mix of revenue-generating assets without paying too much to middlemen, protect it from the taxman and friends and relations with open hands, and repeat for decades while those assets grow. Exactly what those assets are matters surprisingly little, as long as most of them are stocks from profitable companies and bonds from stable governments, and as long as you spread your investments widely and keep your costs low.7 Investors since Jane Austen’s day have been used to returns of about 4% a year plus inflation, whether they held farmland, railroad bonds, or electronics stocks. Over decades, wars, market crashes, and periods of high inflation become bumps in a general upward trend. Done properly, investing is as exciting as watching grass grow, and requires about as much attention as replacing the batteries in your fire alarm once a year.
Anyone interested in personal finance can list people who followed this strategy who were not intellectual or educated. Dave Chilton gave the example of his father, who forgot about a mutual fund for years and had trouble deciphering the difference between units and dollars. Eventually they figured out that it had quadrupled in value since he opened it.8 Dividend investors tell the story of Ronald Read, a gas-station mechanic in Vermont who started to buy dividend stocks in the 1950s and gave away about $8 million when he died in 2014. Read still had his paper stock certificates sitting in a safe-deposit box, and his way of vetting potential investments was to read the Wall Street Journal every day. That was enough to get rich on a mechanic’s wage, because he did not get discouraged when his stocks went down, did not sell what was lagging to buy the latest cool thing just before it dived, and did not splurge when his investments were doing well then take risks to maintain his lifestyle in a bear market. Financial planner Allan S. Roth taught his son to be a better investor than most of his clients in second grade, because his son trusted arithmetic and did not watch business news and buy and sell based on guesses about the future.
Is there anything better?
In 44 years of Wall Street experience and study I have never seen dependable calculations made about common-stock values, or related investment policies, that went beyond simple arithmetic or the most elementary algebra. Whenever excalculus (sic) is brought in, or higher algebra, you could take it as a warning signal that the operator was trying to substitute theory for experience, and usually also to give speculation the deceptive guise of investment.
Benjamin Graham, “The New Speculation in Common Stocks,” The Analysts’ Journal, 1958 p. 20In hundreds of years, nobody has found anything which will grow money faster or with fewer ups and downs than this simple method. The closest I know are five:
- You can up your exposure to (uncertain, high-expected-yield) stocks when you are young, and hope that this time is good for the stock market and you don’t have to draw on your investments in a trough in the market or get discouraged as your savings shrink and shrink. This lifecycle model works well in practice especially when it is automated.
- You can adjust your asset allocation based on macroeconomic statistics, like buying fewer bonds when interest rates are very low and fewer Japanese stocks when the Japanese stock market is exploding like kduzu (dynamic asset allocation or contracyclical rebalancing). This is easier said than done! Done sensibly, it will drag down your returns in good times in exchange for reducing your losses in the bad. Done carelessly, it will tend to trigger taxation as you sell one asset and buy another.9
- You can pick stocks (or hire experts to pick stocks) which have specific mathematical properties or factors. The most famous models were created by Eugene Fama and Kenneth French in the United States. Their five-factor model or smart beta works great on historical data in the USA, but their attempts to apply the model have not been very successful, and others have even more trouble. If you rely on agents, they will be tempted to bend those simple mathematical rules and become just another monkey throwing darts at the finance pages or chasing the latest hot thing, and if you calculate yourself, you have to face the same temptation.10
- You can construct a portfolio with a comfortable balance of risk and return and borrow to invest (use leverage). Finance academics love this idea, but most people have trouble borrowing money at low interest, and investing borrowed money is stressful for many people.11
- You can get involved in running the businesses you partially own. Most people can’t afford to own a large part of even one business (and tying up all that money in one investment is risky), and would have to give up their old job to start working as an executive. It is not a very useful insight that if you were brilliant at your job you would make more money, and if you were paid more you could save more!
The remarkable thing is that these all take some time and math skills, and they do not put you very far ahead of a waitress putting $500 a paycheque towards blue-chip dividend stocks. The waitress might have more ups and downs, but the economist might be ruined when managed futures don’t move as independently from stocks and bonds as the computer said they would. Most honest advocates for these methods estimate that they can gain a fraction of a percent in annual return, or reduce annual volatility by a few percent while keeping expected returns the same.12 That is something but not nearly as much as you gain by realizing that there is no point in paying a fund manager 2% a year to pick stocks for you, or moving from one fund to another because of something you heard on the radio.
Man is the rationalizing animal
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Alexander Pope
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.
Benjamin GrahamThere are also risks in looking for anything better. Humans are very good at deceiving themselves and finding patterns in noise (pareidolia). Very many intelligent people have convinced themselves that they know how to pick stocks or buy high-yield bonds and sell them just before they crash, and very many have ruined themselves because of this. The financial services industry is full of people whose job is to convince you to give them control of your money, from columnists telling you what to sell to the nice man who promises he has a way to make securitized mortgages a safe investment. They will keep a percentage regardless of whether their advice is good. Everyone is lying to you for money, and many are lying to themselves. Another twentieth-century humanist, William J. Bernstein, suggests treating anyone in the financial services industry like a hardened criminal.13 Intermediaries such as the news industry are engaged in entertaining you with future babble and selling sales pitches disguised as popular science. Trading sites and apps are often designed to look sophisticated and stimulating not help you focus on the few relevant facts a few times per year (after all, the people who think they can pick stocks or guess which way interest rates will go are willing to pay for tools, whereas the people who admit they are no good at either just want a few publicly-available numbers in a simple display, so the money is in serving the stock-pickers). The risk of looking for something better is not just that it takes time you could spend reading a book or riding your bike. It is that you will convince yourself or be convinced to do something which is riskier than you know.
Most successful investors do not try to predict the future. Instead, they decide on a pattern of behavior which will have good outcomes in most possible futures, and follow it for decades until randomness has time to average out. If the stock market crashes and does not recover for a decade, your bonds will save you. If the government defaults on its debt, your stocks will save you. If your country is taken over by thieves and ignoramuses, your international assets will protect you (Robeco in the Netherlands saw which way the wind was blowing and spent the 1930s investing in the United States, and were able to report that their surviving clients had done very well by 1946). You don’t need to know which of these will happen when to create an investment policy which can defend against them, any more than a farmer moving her house off a floodplain has to know when the river will rise. She just has to know how high the water has been in the past fifty or one hundred years, and whether there is any reason to think it could go even higher soon. Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 24-year-old who turned a viral essay into a hedge fund, had to watch one of his institutional investors bidding for his assets when he sold at fire-sale prices. They were ready to make money if he was right, and money if he was wrong, and they did not care which because there were a hundred other people with more money than sense in their portfolios and they expected that most of them would blow up.
Brains are overrated
You don’t need a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.
Warren Buffet, Fortune 1990 Investor’s Guide, as quoted by Chris LeithnerSome kinds of Americans (but probably not my gentle readers) like to talk about IQ scores. A contrarian in Australia has gathered the evidence that whatever IQ tests measure is not a help for investors at all. The traits which make a good investor are old-fashioned moral virtues like the ability to live within your means, ignore groupthink and social pressure, acknowledge your own limits, and act rationally when you are terrified. Very clever people without those virtues end up blowing their money studying candle charts or investing in the South Sea Bubble near the peak. If you want to know whether someone will be a good investor, focus on those virtues and behaviors not on things which are loosely correlated with them. If you want to be a better investor, meditating on the Stoics is worth a dozen textbooks on Modern Portfolio Theory. Randall Munro warns of the Engineer Syllogism: some of the worst investors are people with quantitative training, self-confidence, and a love of analyzing systems to find and exploit the hidden rules.14
Cat!
I’m not saying that professional money-managers are not smart or knowledgeable people. They are usually well educated. They try to keep themselves well informed about the economy, market sectors, technologies, and current public affairs. This doesn’t mean they they can predict the market or the price of stocks.
Mathematics PhD, long-time finance-industry consultant, and sustainability expert Michael Edesess, The Big Investment Lie (2007) p. 91When Maciej Ceglowski discovered people dreaming of superintelligence, someone introduced him to Einstein’s cat. Albert Einstein was much more intelligent than a cat, at least as people who dream of superintelligence understand smarts, but that did not let him just tell his cat to get in the carrier. He could beg and offer treats using the best feline psychology the 1940s had to offer, but he could not make the cat do what he wanted without pitting sweater and skin against maws and claws. There are fundamental limits to what you can do just by being smart or intelligent. Investment is another example. The very basics of investment can be grasped and carried out by a child. Once you know those things, success comes down to luck and temperament. And this raises a big question.
Many people try very hard to make as much money as possible from their investments. Serious academic work on the field begins with Louis Bachelier in 1900. And yet being more intelligent than average does almost nothing for an investor. Once you understand basic arithmetic and can imagine different possible futures at the same time, what matters is saving regularly, investing according to a clear strategy, and ignoring anyone who encourages you to change course after less than ten years. You cannot use your intelligence to predict the future of markets any better than anyone else, and you don’t need to make predictions to make money. Hard work is not a virtue in investing either: as Jack Bogle used to say, “don’t do something just stand there!” How many other areas of life are like this? Intelligence and hard work are useful in many areas of life, but not in this one.
Herodotus and Aristotle were wrong that being wise lets you predict the future and get rich. The science-fiction fans in California who think they can have success without effort if they just have a big IQ are wrong too. But Iranians and Indians never agreed again about the daevas, even after wave after wave of Iranian immigration into India. I don’t think this post will convince these people either. What I do think is that skepticism and humbleness about your own limits can save you from many follies. It can be profitable to go along with the latest nonsense. Sometimes you even manage to get out before it all falls apart with your life and your reputation intact. But the jug that is brought to the well too often breaks, and these people keep returning to dangerous follies from a hundred years ago. Some have already ended up in prison, or burned out from the drugs and the obsessive talk about the depravity of mankind and the immanence of the Machine God, and the rest are closer to the precipice than they want to believe.
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.
Oliver Cromwell before the Battle of DunbarIn lieu of donations, I will ask that you listen to one more thing. If you ever meet people who are lively conversationalists and very confident in their brains but say horrible things with a polite tone, the rest of your life may pivot on whether you distance yourself from them or stay in the room. I stopped following their websites and podcasts and found a different martial-arts club, and stayed a poor but honest man. These people were too scared of conflict to say “no Nazi shit,” or too greedy for a chance to pitch their own crank idea to object to the other cranks in the room, and it gained them a few pieces of Bitcoin but cost them their souls. You can always earn more money, but souls are issued one per person.
(scheduled August 2026)
- The philological and religious debate about the chronology is exciting but not for this blog! Encyclopedia Iranica has no entry on pre-Islamic traditions about the div but the Wikipedia entry for daeva is not bad. ↩︎
- This can be seen in their obsession with prediction markets and futurism and IQ scores, and their boasting that they were only a week behind the US government in deciding that COVID would be a big deal (they don’t boast that they gave up infection control in 2022 or so, although they are very keen to debate whether China was to blame). ↩︎
- Robert Rollinger, “The Western Expansion of the ‘Median Empire’: A Re-Examination,” in Giovanni Lanfranchi et al., eds., Continuity of Empire (?) (S.A.R.G.O.N. Edetrice: Padova, 2003) pp. 307-310 ↩︎
- Nathan Vardi, “David Tepper, Andrew Beal and Bill Conway: The Top People In Finance Speak About The Markets,” Forbes, 12 May 2016 ↩︎
- Alfred Cowles 3rd., “Can Stock Market Forecasters Forecast?” Econometrica 1, no. 3 (1933): 309–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/1907042 For subsequent research see William J. Bernstein, The Four Pillars of Investing, Second Edition (McGraw Hill: New York, 2023) pp. 68, 69. ↩︎
- Berber Jin, Ben Cohen, and Anissa Gardizy, The Connections That Turned a Precocious Teen Into the Fallen ‘Nostradamus of AI’, The Wall Street Journal, 25 August 2026. This article does not discuss Aschebnrenner’s shorts on stocks which he thought would be hurt by chatbots, giving him a portfolio of borrowed money in holdings which would all go up or down together. Even a chatbot could have told him this was very risky. The authors did not even try to explain how Aschenbrenner thought really smart computers would lead to faster-than-light travel because Silicon Valley is a silly place (I can’t explain it either although American science fiction fans have hated relativity for a long time). ↩︎
- Mebane T. Faber’s Global Asset Allocation (The Idea Farm LP, 2015) is one good place to start. He found that from 1973 to 2013, all sensible portfolios returned investors in the USA somewhere between 4% a year and 6% a year after inflation if you picked one and stuck with it. If you switched from whatever strategy was having a bad decade to whatever was doing well this year you would perform poorly, because all strategies have good decades and bad decades, and changing course to whatever has done well recently just locks in your losses while giving up some of the good times. ↩︎
- Dave Chilton, The Wealthy Barber Returns (Financial Awareness Corp, 2011) pp. 170-171 ↩︎
- Efficient Market Theorists have a Mirror Universe version of this policy, where if stocks in Syldavia are booming, that is not a sign to cash in some of your winnings but the rational market deciding that Syldavia is the best place to invest. I don’t take investment advice from people with goatees under a sword-and-planet logo but you do you ↩︎
- I can’t resist putting a European company called AI Alpha Lab in to the historical record. Its marketing pitch is breathtaking: “Initializing AI Alpha Lab… Connected. Thank you for visiting our site. I am an AI model specifically developed for investing, nothing else. I use data and probabilities to make investment decisions. I have no biases or preferences. And no humans interfere with my investment decisions. Welcome to the future of investing. Today.” Anyone with Math 12, a Raspberry Pi, and a brokerage account can apply factor investing, but the problems are always getting humans to stick with it and the possibility that the future is not like the past. Many investing strategies work brilliantly until they don’t, and many people say they will stay the course then withdraw their money the first time their account drops 20%. More experts, more data, and more number-crunching cannot avoid these basic problems. ↩︎
- One site pushing “return stacking” proposes for the sake of argument that you can borrow money at 0.5% greater than the yield of a 90-day U.S. government treasury bill. Indeed, if I could borrow money as cheaply as the Irvings can, all kinds of wonderful opportunities would open up for me! ↩︎
- Eg. Dimensional Fund Advisors’ ten-year annualized return for Canadian equities is 13.03% which is a quarter of a percent higher than a plain old TSX index like XIC (12.74%) or VCN (12.63%). When you read the prospectus you realized that to invest in Dimensional’s products you need a paid advisor who will generally charge at least 0.75% a year. Cullen Roche spent ten years developing a rule to switch between stocks and bonds based on macroeconomic statistics which has historically returned 0.12% more a year than a simple 60/40 portfolio (Your Perfect Portfolio p. 212). This strategy requires frequently selling stocks to buy bonds or bonds to buy stocks, which is a taxable event in a non-registered account. Meb Faber has his own version of this idea with the same impressive backtest and the same problems of tax drag and how to know if the strategy will continue to work: Meb Faber, “A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation,” The Journal of Wealth Management, Spring 2007 https://ssrn.com/abstract=962461. ↩︎
- William J. Bernstein, If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly (self-published, 2014) ↩︎
- Bernstein calls this the engineer’s mistake (Four Pillars of Investing, second edition p. 194) and uses phrases like “less math, more Shakespeare.” ↩︎
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Investing is Einstein’s Cat, or, The Thales Fallacy
This is a cat named Einstein not Einstein’s cat, but isn’t he gorgeous? You can see his person reflected in his eyes. Photo from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Einstein_(7996196819).jpgTwo or three thousand years ago, Indo-European speakers who had turned back at the Khyber Pass decided that some of the gods of their fathers, the daevas, were malevolent spirits.1 Their relatives in the Indus Valley disagreed and so the languages and religions diverted. Twenty or thirty years ago, I was growing up a science-fiction fan without ever having met one in person. From yellowing paperbacks and early websites I became a twentieth-century humanist well inoculated against some of the follies which clever young men are prone to. I did not know that in California the same movement was festering into something proudly un-democratic, full of longings for yesterday’s tomorrows and resentment that not everyone recognized them as the rightful rulers. I cannot stop them, that work is for people in the United States and UK. I cannot bridge that gap. But this month I can explain what is wrong with two of their core beliefs: that intelligence is the ability to predict the future, and that predicting the future leads to success.2 The story starts with Thales of Miletus and an olive-press, and ends with Albert Einstein and a cat carrier.
After this, seeing that Alyattes would not give up the Scythians to Cyaxares at his demand, there was war between the Lydians and the Medes for five years; each won many victories over the other, and once they fought a battle by night. They were still warring with equal success, when it chanced, at an encounter which happened during the sixth year, that during the battle the day was suddenly turned to night. Thales of Miletus had foretold this loss of daylight to the Ionians, fixing it within the year in which the change did indeed happen. So when the Lydians and Medes saw the day turned to night they ceased from fighting, and both were the more zealous to make peace.
Herodotus, Histories, 1.74 tr. A.d. GodleyThales of Miletus was one of the Seven Sages of Ionia, and later Greeks decided that he must have been good at predictions too. Herodotus told a story that he predicted a solar eclipse, and Aristotle taught his students that Thales used his wisdom to predict that the olive-harvest would be bountiful, and rented all the olive-presses in Miletus and Chios in advance (Politics 1.1259a). When the olives needed pressing, he could charge what he liked. Fun-ruining historians point out that not even Babylonians could predict a solar eclipse in the sixth century BCE, and the economy in Aristotle’s story looks much more like the world he lived in than the world Thales lived in.3 The Aegean around 600 BCE was not a place where everything had a price, but a place where landlords were proud that their neighbours had to come to them and beg to use their olive-presses or borrow some barley before the harvest. The important part of the story is that later generations believed that if Thales was wise he must have been able to use his wisdom to predict the future and get rich. If you can predict something in the natural world, like the movements of the planets, you can predict things in the world of markets and get rich. Anyone who flips through a news magazine or opens YouTube can find worshipful interviews with someone who made a successful prediction in the past. But when you ask the wisest and most mathematically qualified people in investing, they have a very different attitude towards predictions.
Forecasting is for losers
In the spring of 1971, I was about to become a newly minted Ph.D. in abstract, or ‘pure,’ mathematics. … Jobs that would have challenged and fascinated me were, for me, tainted because they only contributed to a war (in Vietnam) I didn’t believe in. … I … was offered a job (at a brokerage firm in Chicago). I thought, I don’t know anything about the stock market— I don’t even know what it is— but I may as well learn about it. Besides, I should easily be able to get rich using my knowledge of mathematics, and why not? … Little was I to know how many people I would meet over the years with the same idea, all of whom would be wrong.
Mathematics PhD, long-time finance-industry consultant, and sustainability expert Michael Edesess, The Big Investment Lie (2007) pp. 1-2One day a friend of my father-of the rich and confident variety- called me during his New York visit (to set the elements of pecking order straight, he hinted right away during the call that he came by Concorde, with some derogatory comments on the comfort of such methods of transportation). He wanted to pick my brain on the state of a collection of financial markets. I truly had no opinion, nor had made any effort to formulate any, nor was I remotely interested in markets. … I … did not make predictions, period.
Hedge-fund quant Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness (2004) pp. 102, 103The important turning points in markets are never identified with precision in advance by ‘experts’ and policymakers. This lack of foresight is not surprising, because markets and the course of the economy are not model-able scientific phenomena but rather are examples of mass human behavior, which are never predictable with anything like precision.
Hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, interview with Forbes, 20164But people don’t always want the best risk adjusted returns, sometimes people want to speculate … They want to express an informational belief, and who am I to say that’s wrong?
Certified Financial Planner Ben Felix, Rational Reminder podcast episode 201 (2022, automated transcript has not been verified)Most successful investors do not try to predict the future, except in the way you predict that it is more likely to be sunny in summer than winter and you are more likely to get the job if you apply for it. Markets are so unpredictable that it can take fifteen or twenty years to tell the difference between skill and luck. When people sit down to determine “Can Stock Market Forecasters Forecast?” they get the same answer as Alfred Cowles in 1933: no.5 The last century or so of investment history is dotted with unprecedented events, from the Russian Revolution to the decline of dividend yields in the 1950s to the Zero Interest-Rate Policy. You can learn to expect a sequence of booms and busts by studying the past, but not foresee these black swans which are only in the future. Moreover, you have to be able to survive the times that things do not happen the way you expect, as one 24-year-old investor found out. He was so confident that AI would let him buy entire galaxies like an E.E. “Doc” Smith character (and in the excellent grades he had received on standardized tests) that he did not worry that his stocks might fall in value in the short term.6 Rather than trying to guess the one thing which will happen, executives focus their thinking about the many things which might happen and how to survive each. Unless you run an insurance agency, trying to predict the future is just not a reliable way to grow your money.
Instead, the way to get and stay rich is to follow a few simple rules: save every month, invest it in a diversified mix of revenue-generating assets without paying too much to middlemen, protect it from the taxman and friends and relations with open hands, and repeat for decades while those assets grow. Exactly what those assets are matters surprisingly little, as long as most of them are stocks from profitable companies and bonds from stable governments, and as long as you spread your investments widely and keep your costs low.7 Investors since Jane Austen’s day have been used to returns of about 4% a year plus inflation, whether they held farmland, railroad bonds, or electronics stocks. Over decades, wars, market crashes, and periods of high inflation become bumps in a general upward trend. Done properly, investing is as exciting as watching grass grow, and requires about as much attention as replacing the batteries in your fire alarm once a year.
Anyone interested in personal finance can list people who followed this strategy who were not intellectual or educated. Dave Chilton gave the example of his father, who forgot about a mutual fund for years and had trouble deciphering the difference between units and dollars. Eventually they figured out that it had quadrupled in value since he opened it.8 Dividend investors tell the story of Ronald Read, a gas-station mechanic in Vermont who started to buy dividend stocks in the 1950s and gave away about $8 million when he died in 2014. Read still had his paper stock certificates sitting in a safe-deposit box, and his way of vetting potential investments was to read the Wall Street Journal every day. That was enough to get rich on a mechanic’s wage, because he did not get discouraged when his stocks went down, did not sell what was lagging to buy the latest cool thing just before it dived, and did not splurge when his investments were doing well then take risks to maintain his lifestyle in a bear market. Financial planner Allan S. Roth taught his son to be a better investor than most of his clients in second grade, because his son trusted arithmetic and did not watch business news and buy and sell based on guesses about the future.
Is there anything better?
In 44 years of Wall Street experience and study I have never seen dependable calculations made about common-stock values, or related investment policies, that went beyond simple arithmetic or the most elementary algebra. Whenever excalculus (sic) is brought in, or higher algebra, you could take it as a warning signal that the operator was trying to substitute theory for experience, and usually also to give speculation the deceptive guise of investment.
Benjamin Graham, “The New Speculation in Common Stocks,” The Analysts’ Journal, 1958 p. 20In hundreds of years, nobody has found anything which will grow money faster or with fewer ups and downs than this simple method. The closest I know are five:
- You can up your exposure to (uncertain, high-expected-yield) stocks when you are young, and hope that this time is good for the stock market and you don’t have to draw on your investments in a trough in the market or get discouraged as your savings shrink and shrink. This lifecycle model works well in practice especially when it is automated.
- You can adjust your asset allocation based on macroeconomic statistics, like buying fewer bonds when interest rates are very low and fewer Japanese stocks when the Japanese stock market is exploding like kduzu (dynamic asset allocation or contracyclical rebalancing). This is easier said than done! Done sensibly, it will drag down your returns in good times in exchange for reducing your losses in the bad. Done carelessly, it will tend to trigger taxation as you sell one asset and buy another.9
- You can pick stocks (or hire experts to pick stocks) which have specific mathematical properties or factors. The most famous models were created by Eugene Fama and Kenneth French in the United States. Their five-factor model or smart beta works great on historical data in the USA, but their attempts to apply the model have not been very successful, and others have even more trouble. If you rely on agents, they will be tempted to bend those simple mathematical rules and become just another monkey throwing darts at the finance pages or chasing the latest hot thing, and if you calculate yourself, you have to face the same temptation.10
- You can construct a portfolio with a comfortable balance of risk and return and borrow to invest (use leverage). Finance academics love this idea, but most people have trouble borrowing money at low interest, and investing borrowed money is stressful for many people.11
- You can get involved in running the businesses you partially own. Most people can’t afford to own a large part of even one business (and tying up all that money in one investment is risky), and would have to give up their old job to start working as an executive. It is not a very useful insight that if you were brilliant at your job you would make more money, and if you were paid more you could save more!
The remarkable thing is that these all take some time and math skills, and they do not put you very far ahead of a waitress putting $500 a paycheque towards blue-chip dividend stocks. The waitress might have more ups and downs, but the economist might be ruined when managed futures don’t move as independently from stocks and bonds as the computer said they would. Most honest advocates for these methods estimate that they can gain a fraction of a percent in annual return, or reduce annual volatility by a few percent while keeping expected returns the same.12 That is something but not nearly as much as you gain by realizing that there is no point in paying a fund manager 2% a year to pick stocks for you, or moving from one fund to another because of something you heard on the radio.
Man is the rationalizing animal
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Alexander Pope
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.
Benjamin GrahamThere are also risks in looking for anything better. Humans are very good at deceiving themselves and finding patterns in noise (pareidolia). Very many intelligent people have convinced themselves that they know how to pick stocks or buy high-yield bonds and sell them just before they crash, and very many have ruined themselves because of this. The financial services industry is full of people whose job is to convince you to give them control of your money, from columnists telling you what to sell to the nice man who promises he has a way to make securitized mortgages a safe investment. They will keep a percentage regardless of whether their advice is good. Everyone is lying to you for money, and many are lying to themselves. Another twentieth-century humanist, William J. Bernstein, suggests treating anyone in the financial services industry like a hardened criminal.13 Intermediaries such as the news industry are engaged in entertaining you with future babble and selling sales pitches disguised as popular science. Trading sites and apps are often designed to look sophisticated and stimulating not help you focus on the few relevant facts a few times per year (after all, the people who think they can pick stocks or guess which way interest rates will go are willing to pay for tools, whereas the people who admit they are no good at either just want a few publicly-available numbers in a simple display, so the money is in serving the stock-pickers). The risk of looking for something better is not just that it takes time you could spend reading a book or riding your bike. It is that you will convince yourself or be convinced to do something which is riskier than you know.
Most successful investors do not try to predict the future. Instead, they decide on a pattern of behavior which will have good outcomes in most possible futures, and follow it for decades until randomness has time to average out. If the stock market crashes and does not recover for a decade, your bonds will save you. If the government defaults on its debt, your stocks will save you. If your country is taken over by thieves and ignoramuses, your international assets will protect you (Robeco in the Netherlands saw which way the wind was blowing and spent the 1930s investing in the United States, and were able to report that their surviving clients had done very well by 1946). You don’t need to know which of these will happen when to create an investment policy which can defend against them, any more than a farmer moving her house off a floodplain has to know when the river will rise. She just has to know how high the water has been in the past fifty or one hundred years, and whether there is any reason to think it could go even higher soon. Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 24-year-old who turned a viral essay into a hedge fund, had to watch one of his institutional investors bidding for his assets when he sold at fire-sale prices. They were ready to make money if he was right, and money if he was wrong, and they did not care which because there were a hundred other people with more money than sense in their portfolios and they expected that most of them would blow up.
Brains are overrated
You don’t need a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.
Warren Buffet, Fortune 1990 Investor’s Guide, as quoted by Chris LeithnerSome kinds of Americans (but probably not my gentle readers) like to talk about IQ scores. A contrarian in Australia has gathered the evidence that whatever IQ tests measure is not a help for investors at all. The traits which make a good investor are old-fashioned moral virtues like the ability to live within your means, ignore groupthink and social pressure, acknowledge your own limits, and act rationally when you are terrified. Very clever people without those virtues end up blowing their money studying candle charts or investing in the South Sea Bubble near the peak. If you want to know whether someone will be a good investor, focus on those virtues and behaviors not on things which are loosely correlated with them. If you want to be a better investor, meditating on the Stoics is worth a dozen textbooks on Modern Portfolio Theory. Randall Munro warns of the Engineer Syllogism: some of the worst investors are people with quantitative training, self-confidence, and a love of analyzing systems to find and exploit the hidden rules.14
Cat!
I’m not saying that professional money-managers are not smart or knowledgeable people. They are usually well educated. They try to keep themselves well informed about the economy, market sectors, technologies, and current public affairs. This doesn’t mean they they can predict the market or the price of stocks.
Mathematics PhD, long-time finance-industry consultant, and sustainability expert Michael Edesess, The Big Investment Lie (2007) p. 91When Maciej Ceglowski discovered people dreaming of superintelligence, someone introduced him to Einstein’s cat. Albert Einstein was much more intelligent than a cat, at least as people who dream of superintelligence understand smarts, but that did not let him just tell his cat to get in the carrier. He could beg and offer treats using the best feline psychology the 1940s had to offer, but he could not make the cat do what he wanted without pitting sweater and skin against maws and claws. There are fundamental limits to what you can do just by being smart or intelligent. Investment is another example. The very basics of investment can be grasped and carried out by a child. Once you know those things, success comes down to luck and temperament. And this raises a big question.
Many people try very hard to make as much money as possible from their investments. Serious academic work on the field begins with Louis Bachelier in 1900. And yet being more intelligent than average does almost nothing for an investor. Once you understand basic arithmetic and can imagine different possible futures at the same time, what matters is saving regularly, investing according to a clear strategy, and ignoring anyone who encourages you to change course after less than ten years. You cannot use your intelligence to predict the future of markets any better than anyone else, and you don’t need to make predictions to make money. Hard work is not a virtue in investing either: as Jack Bogle used to say, “don’t do something just stand there!” How many other areas of life are like this? Intelligence and hard work are useful in many areas of life, but not in this one.
Herodotus and Aristotle were wrong that being wise lets you predict the future and get rich. The science-fiction fans in California who think they can have success without effort if they just have a big IQ are wrong too. But Iranians and Indians never agreed again about the daevas, even after wave after wave of Iranian immigration into India. I don’t think this post will convince these people either. What I do think is that skepticism and humbleness about your own limits can save you from many follies. It can be profitable to go along with the latest nonsense. Sometimes you even manage to get out before it all falls apart with your life and your reputation intact. But the jug that is brought to the well too often breaks, and these people keep returning to dangerous follies from a hundred years ago. Some have already ended up in prison, or burned out from the drugs and the obsessive talk about the depravity of mankind and the immanence of the Machine God, and the rest are closer to the precipice than they want to believe.
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.
Oliver Cromwell before the Battle of DunbarIn lieu of donations, I will ask that you listen to one more thing. If you ever meet people who are lively conversationalists and very confident in their brains but say horrible things with a polite tone, the rest of your life may pivot on whether you distance yourself from them or stay in the room. I stopped following their websites and podcasts and found a different martial-arts club, and stayed a poor but honest man. These people were too scared of conflict to say “no Nazi shit,” or too greedy for a chance to pitch their own crank idea to object to the other cranks in the room, and it gained them a few pieces of Bitcoin but cost them their souls. You can always earn more money, but souls are issued one per person.
(scheduled August 2026)
- The philological and religious debate about the chronology is exciting but not for this blog! Encyclopedia Iranica has no entry on pre-Islamic traditions about the div but the Wikipedia entry for daeva is not bad. ↩︎
- This can be seen in their obsession with prediction markets and futurism and IQ scores, and their boasting that they were only a week behind the US government in deciding that COVID would be a big deal (they don’t boast that they gave up infection control in 2022 or so, although they are very keen to debate whether China was to blame). ↩︎
- Robert Rollinger, “The Western Expansion of the ‘Median Empire’: A Re-Examination,” in Giovanni Lanfranchi et al., eds., Continuity of Empire (?) (S.A.R.G.O.N. Edetrice: Padova, 2003) pp. 307-310 ↩︎
- Nathan Vardi, “David Tepper, Andrew Beal and Bill Conway: The Top People In Finance Speak About The Markets,” Forbes, 12 May 2016 ↩︎
- Alfred Cowles 3rd., “Can Stock Market Forecasters Forecast?” Econometrica 1, no. 3 (1933): 309–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/1907042 For subsequent research see William J. Bernstein, The Four Pillars of Investing, Second Edition (McGraw Hill: New York, 2023) pp. 68, 69. ↩︎
- Berber Jin, Ben Cohen, and Anissa Gardizy, The Connections That Turned a Precocious Teen Into the Fallen ‘Nostradamus of AI’, The Wall Street Journal, 25 August 2026. This article does not discuss Aschebnrenner’s shorts on stocks which he thought would be hurt by chatbots, giving him a portfolio of borrowed money in holdings which would all go up or down together. Even a chatbot could have told him this was very risky. The authors did not even try to explain how Aschenbrenner thought really smart computers would lead to faster-than-light travel because Silicon Valley is a silly place (I can’t explain it either although American science fiction fans have hated relativity for a long time). ↩︎
- Mebane T. Faber’s Global Asset Allocation (The Idea Farm LP, 2015) is one good place to start. He found that from 1973 to 2013, all sensible portfolios returned investors in the USA somewhere between 4% a year and 6% a year after inflation if you picked one and stuck with it. If you switched from whatever strategy was having a bad decade to whatever was doing well this year you would perform poorly, because all strategies have good decades and bad decades, and changing course to whatever has done well recently just locks in your losses while giving up some of the good times. ↩︎
- Dave Chilton, The Wealthy Barber Returns (Financial Awareness Corp, 2011) pp. 170-171 ↩︎
- Efficient Market Theorists have a Mirror Universe version of this policy, where if stocks in Syldavia are booming, that is not a sign to cash in some of your winnings but the rational market deciding that Syldavia is the best place to invest. I don’t take investment advice from people with goatees under a sword-and-planet logo but you do you ↩︎
- I can’t resist putting a European company called AI Alpha Lab in to the historical record. Its marketing pitch is breathtaking: “Initializing AI Alpha Lab… Connected. Thank you for visiting our site. I am an AI model specifically developed for investing, nothing else. I use data and probabilities to make investment decisions. I have no biases or preferences. And no humans interfere with my investment decisions. Welcome to the future of investing. Today.” Anyone with Math 12, a Raspberry Pi, and a brokerage account can apply factor investing, but the problems are always getting humans to stick with it and the possibility that the future is not like the past. Many investing strategies work brilliantly until they don’t, and many people say they will stay the course then withdraw their money the first time their account drops 20%. More experts, more data, and more number-crunching cannot avoid these basic problems. ↩︎
- One site pushing “return stacking” proposes for the sake of argument that you can borrow money at 0.5% greater than the yield of a 90-day U.S. government treasury bill. Indeed, if I could borrow money as cheaply as the Irvings can, all kinds of wonderful opportunities would open up for me! ↩︎
- Eg. Dimensional Fund Advisors’ ten-year annualized return for Canadian equities is 13.03% which is a quarter of a percent higher than a plain old TSX index like XIC (12.74%) or VCN (12.63%). When you read the prospectus you realized that to invest in Dimensional’s products you need a paid advisor who will generally charge at least 0.75% a year. Cullen Roche spent ten years developing a rule to switch between stocks and bonds based on macroeconomic statistics which has historically returned 0.12% more a year than a simple 60/40 portfolio (Your Perfect Portfolio p. 212). This strategy requires frequently selling stocks to buy bonds or bonds to buy stocks, which is a taxable event in a non-registered account. Meb Faber has his own version of this idea with the same impressive backtest and the same problems of tax drag and how to know if the strategy will continue to work: Meb Faber, “A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation,” The Journal of Wealth Management, Spring 2007 https://ssrn.com/abstract=962461. ↩︎
- William J. Bernstein, If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly (self-published, 2014) ↩︎
- Bernstein calls this the engineer’s mistake (Four Pillars of Investing, second edition p. 194) and uses phrases like “less math, more Shakespeare.” ↩︎
-
Investing is Einstein’s Cat, or, The Thales Fallacy
This is a cat named Einstein not Einstein’s cat, but isn’t he gorgeous? You can see his person reflected in his eyes. Photo from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Einstein_(7996196819).jpgTwo or three thousand years ago, Indo-European speakers who had turned back at the Khyber Pass decided that some of the gods of their fathers, the daevas, were malevolent spirits.1 Their relatives in the Indus Valley disagreed and so the languages and religions diverted. Twenty or thirty years ago, I was growing up a science-fiction fan without ever having met one in person. From yellowing paperbacks and early websites I became a twentieth-century humanist well inoculated against some of the follies which clever young men are prone to. I did not know that in California the same movement was festering into something proudly un-democratic, full of longings for yesterday’s tomorrows and resentment that not everyone recognized them as the rightful rulers. I cannot stop them, that work is for people in the United States and UK. I cannot bridge that gap. But this month I can explain what is wrong with two of their core beliefs: that intelligence is the ability to predict the future, and that predicting the future leads to success.2 The story starts with Thales of Miletus and an olive-press, and ends with Albert Einstein and a cat carrier.
After this, seeing that Alyattes would not give up the Scythians to Cyaxares at his demand, there was war between the Lydians and the Medes for five years; each won many victories over the other, and once they fought a battle by night. They were still warring with equal success, when it chanced, at an encounter which happened during the sixth year, that during the battle the day was suddenly turned to night. Thales of Miletus had foretold this loss of daylight to the Ionians, fixing it within the year in which the change did indeed happen. So when the Lydians and Medes saw the day turned to night they ceased from fighting, and both were the more zealous to make peace.
Herodotus, Histories, 1.74 tr. A.d. GodleyThales of Miletus was one of the Seven Sages of Ionia, and later Greeks decided that he must have been good at predictions too. Herodotus told a story that he predicted a solar eclipse, and Aristotle taught his students that Thales used his wisdom to predict that the olive-harvest would be bountiful, and rented all the olive-presses in Miletus and Chios in advance (Politics 1.1259a). When the olives needed pressing, he could charge what he liked. Fun-ruining historians point out that not even Babylonians could predict a solar eclipse in the sixth century BCE, and the economy in Aristotle’s story looks much more like the world he lived in than the world Thales lived in.3 The Aegean around 600 BCE was not a place where everything had a price, but a place where landlords were proud that their neighbours had to come to them and beg to use their olive-presses or borrow some barley before the harvest. The important part of the story is that later generations believed that if Thales was wise he must have been able to use his wisdom to predict the future and get rich. If you can predict something in the natural world, like the movements of the planets, you can predict things in the world of markets and get rich. Anyone who flips through a news magazine or opens YouTube can find worshipful interviews with someone who made a successful prediction in the past. But when you ask the wisest and most mathematically qualified people in investing, they have a very different attitude towards predictions.
Forecasting is for losers
In the spring of 1971, I was about to become a newly minted Ph.D. in abstract, or ‘pure,’ mathematics. … Jobs that would have challenged and fascinated me were, for me, tainted because they only contributed to a war (in Vietnam) I didn’t believe in. … I … was offered a job (at a brokerage firm in Chicago). I thought, I don’t know anything about the stock market— I don’t even know what it is— but I may as well learn about it. Besides, I should easily be able to get rich using my knowledge of mathematics, and why not? … Little was I to know how many people I would meet over the years with the same idea, all of whom would be wrong.
Mathematics PhD, long-time finance-industry consultant, and sustainability expert Michael Edesess, The Big Investment Lie (2007) pp. 1-2One day a friend of my father-of the rich and confident variety- called me during his New York visit (to set the elements of pecking order straight, he hinted right away during the call that he came by Concorde, with some derogatory comments on the comfort of such methods of transportation). He wanted to pick my brain on the state of a collection of financial markets. I truly had no opinion, nor had made any effort to formulate any, nor was I remotely interested in markets. … I … did not make predictions, period.
Hedge-fund quant Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness (2004) pp. 102, 103The important turning points in markets are never identified with precision in advance by ‘experts’ and policymakers. This lack of foresight is not surprising, because markets and the course of the economy are not model-able scientific phenomena but rather are examples of mass human behavior, which are never predictable with anything like precision.
Hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, interview with Forbes, 20164But people don’t always want the best risk adjusted returns, sometimes people want to speculate … They want to express an informational belief, and who am I to say that’s wrong?
Certified Financial Planner Ben Felix, Rational Reminder podcast episode 201 (2022, automated transcript has not been verified)Most successful investors do not try to predict the future, except in the way you predict that it is more likely to be sunny in summer than winter and you are more likely to get the job if you apply for it. Markets are so unpredictable that it can take fifteen or twenty years to tell the difference between skill and luck. When people sit down to determine “Can Stock Market Forecasters Forecast?” they get the same answer as Alfred Cowles in 1933: no.5 The last century or so of investment history is dotted with unprecedented events, from the Russian Revolution to the decline of dividend yields in the 1950s to the Zero Interest-Rate Policy. You can learn to expect a sequence of booms and busts by studying the past, but not foresee these black swans which are only in the future. Moreover, you have to be able to survive the times that things do not happen the way you expect, as one 24-year-old investor found out. He was so confident that AI would let him buy entire galaxies like an E.E. “Doc” Smith character (and in the excellent grades he had received on standardized tests) that he did not worry that his stocks might fall in value in the short term.6 Rather than trying to guess the one thing which will happen, executives focus their thinking about the many things which might happen and how to survive each. So while being able to predict the future would be nice, there seems to be no reliable way to do it, except in the way an insurance company predicts about how many clients will make claims in the next fiscal year. Trying to do what almost no one can do is not not a good strategy.
Instead, the way to get and stay rich is to follow a few simple rules: save every month, invest it in a diversified mix of revenue-generating assets without paying too much to middlemen, protect it from the taxman and friends and relations with open hands, and repeat for decades while those assets grow. Exactly what those assets are matters surprisingly little, as long as most of them are stocks from profitable companies and bonds from stable governments, and as long as you spread your investments widely and keep your costs low.7 Investors since Jane Austen’s day have been used to returns of about 4% a year plus inflation, whether they held farmland, railroad bonds, or electronics stocks. Over decades, wars, market crashes, and periods of high inflation become bumps in a general upward trend. Done properly, investing is as exciting as watching grass grow, and requires about as much attention as replacing the batteries in your fire alarm once a year.
Anyone interested in personal finance can list people who followed this strategy who were not intellectual or educated. Dave Chilton gave the example of his father, who forgot about a mutual fund for years and had trouble deciphering the difference between units and dollars. Eventually they figured out that it had quadrupled in value since he opened it.8 Dividend investors tell the story of Ronald Read, a gas-station mechanic in Vermont who started to buy dividend stocks in the 1950s and gave away about $8 million when he died in 2014. Read still had his paper stock certificates sitting in a safe-deposit box, and his way of vetting potential investments was to read the Wall Street Journal every day. That was enough to get rich on a mechanic’s wage, because he did not get discouraged when his stocks went down, did not sell what was lagging to buy the latest cool thing just before it dived, and did not splurge when his investments were doing well then take risks to maintain his lifestyle in a bear market. Financial planner Allan S. Roth taught his son to be a better investor than most of his clients in second grade, because his son trusted arithmetic and did not watch business news and buy and sell based on guesses about the future.
Is there anything better?
In 44 years of Wall Street experience and study I have never seen dependable calculations made about common-stock values, or related investment policies, that went beyond simple arithmetic or the most elementary algebra. Whenever excalculus (sic) is brought in, or higher algebra, you could take it as a warning signal that the operator was trying to substitute theory for experience, and usually also to give speculation the deceptive guise of investment.
Benjamin Graham, “The New Speculation in Common Stocks,” The Analysts’ Journal, 1958 p. 20In hundreds of years, nobody has found anything which will grow money faster or with fewer ups and downs than this simple method. The closest I know are five:
- You can up your exposure to (uncertain, high-expected-yield) stocks when you are young, and hope that this time is good for the stock market and you don’t have to draw on your investments in a trough in the market or get discouraged as your savings shrink and shrink. This lifecycle model works well in practice especially when it is automated.
- You can adjust your asset allocation based on macroeconomic statistics, like buying fewer bonds when interest rates are very low and fewer Japanese stocks when the Japanese stock market is exploding like kduzu (dynamic asset allocation or contracyclical rebalancing). This is easier said than done! Done sensibly, it will drag down your returns in good times in exchange for reducing your losses in the bad. Done carelessly, it will tend to trigger taxation as you sell one asset and buy another.9
- You can pick stocks (or hire experts to pick stocks) which have specific mathematical properties or factors. The most famous models were created by Eugene Fama and Kenneth French in the United States. Their five-factor model or smart beta works great on historical data in the USA, but their attempts to apply the model have not been very successful, and others have even more trouble. If you rely on agents, they will be tempted to bend those simple mathematical rules and become just another monkey throwing darts at the finance pages or chasing the latest hot thing, and if you calculate yourself, you have to face the same temptation.10
- You can construct a portfolio with a comfortable balance of risk and return and borrow to invest (use leverage). Finance academics love this idea, but most people have trouble borrowing money at low interest, and investing borrowed money is stressful for many people.11
- You can get involved in running the businesses you partially own. Most people can’t afford to own a large part of even one business (and tying up all that money in one investment is risky), and would have to give up their old job to start working as an executive. It is not a very useful insight that if you were brilliant at your job you would make more money, and if you were paid more you could save more!
The remarkable thing is that these all take some time and math skills, and they do not put you very far ahead of a waitress putting $500 a paycheque towards blue-chip dividend stocks. The waitress might have more ups and downs, but the economist might be ruined when managed futures don’t move as independently from stocks and bonds as the computer said they would. Most honest advocates for these methods estimate that they can gain a fraction of a percent in annual return, or reduce annual volatility by a few percent while keeping expected returns the same.12 That is something but not nearly as much as you gain by realizing that there is no point in paying a fund manager 2% a year to pick stocks for you, or moving from one fund to another because of something you heard on the radio.
Man is the rationalizing animal
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Alexander Pope
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.
Benjamin GrahamThere are also risks in looking for anything better. Humans are very good at deceiving themselves and finding patterns in noise (pareidolia). Very many intelligent people have convinced themselves that they know how to pick stocks or buy high-yield bonds and sell them just before they crash, and very many have ruined themselves because of this. The financial services industry is full of people whose job is to convince you to give them control of your money, from columnists telling you what to sell to the nice man who promises he has a way to make securitized mortgages a safe investment. They will keep a percentage regardless of whether their advice is good. Everyone is lying to you for money, and many are lying to themselves. Another twentieth-century humanist, William J. Bernstein, suggests treating anyone in the financial services industry like a hardened criminal.13 Intermediaries such as the news industry are engaged in entertaining you with future babble and selling sales pitches disguised as popular science. Trading sites and apps are often designed to look sophisticated and stimulating not help you focus on the few relevant facts a few times per year (after all, the people who think they can pick stocks or guess which way interest rates will go are willing to pay for tools, whereas the people who admit they are no good at either just want a few publicly-available numbers in a simple display, so the money is in serving the stock-pickers). The risk of looking for something better is not just that it takes time you could spend reading a book or riding your bike. It is that you will convince yourself or be convinced to do something which is riskier than you know.
Most successful investors do not try to predict the future. Instead, they decide on a pattern of behavior which will have good outcomes in most possible futures, and follow it for decades until randomness has time to average out. If the stock market crashes and does not recover for a decade, your bonds will save you. If the government defaults on its debt, your stocks will save you. If your country is taken over by thieves and ignoramuses, your international assets will protect you (Robeco in the Netherlands saw which way the wind was blowing and spent the 1930s investing in the United States, and were able to report that their surviving clients had done very well by 1946). You don’t need to know which of these will happen when to create an investment policy which can defend against them, any more than a farmer moving her house off a floodplain has to know when the river will rise. She just has to know how high the water has been in the past fifty or one hundred years, and whether there is any reason to think it could go even higher soon. Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 24-year-old who turned a viral essay into a hedge fund, had to watch one of his institutional investors bidding for his assets when he sold at fire-sale prices. They were ready to make money if he was right, and money if he was wrong, and they did not care which because there were a hundred other people with more money than sense in their portfolios and they expected that most of them would blow up.
Brains are overrated
You don’t need a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.
Warren Buffet, Fortune 1990 Investor’s Guide, as quoted by Chris LeithnerSome kinds of Americans (but probably not my gentle readers) like to talk about IQ scores. A contrarian in Australia has gathered the evidence that whatever IQ tests measure is not a help for investors at all. The traits which make a good investor are old-fashioned moral virtues like the ability to live within your means, ignore groupthink and social pressure, acknowledge your own limits, and act rationally when you are terrified. Very clever people without those virtues end up blowing their money studying candle charts or investing in the South Sea Bubble near the peak. If you want to know whether someone will be a good investor, focus on those virtues and behaviors not on things which are loosely correlated with them. If you want to be a better investor, meditating on the Stoics is worth a dozen textbooks on Modern Portfolio Theory. Randall Munro warns of the Engineer Syllogism: some of the worst investors are people with quantitative training, self-confidence, and a love of analyzing systems to find and exploit the hidden rules.14
Cat!
I’m not saying that professional money-managers are not smart or knowledgeable people. They are usually well educated. They try to keep themselves well informed about the economy, market sectors, technologies, and current public affairs. This doesn’t mean they they can predict the market or the price of stocks.
Mathematics PhD, long-time finance-industry consultant, and sustainability expert Michael Edesess, The Big Investment Lie (2007) p. 91When Maciej Ceglowski discovered people dreaming of superintelligence, someone introduced him to Einstein’s cat. Albert Einstein was much more intelligent than a cat, at least as people who dream of superintelligence understand smarts, but that did not let him just tell his cat to get in the carrier. He could beg and offer treats using the best feline psychology the 1940s had to offer, but he could not make the cat do what he wanted without pitting sweater and skin against maws and claws. There are fundamental limits to what you can do just by being smart or intelligent. Investment is another example. The very basics of investment can be grasped and carried out by a child. Once you know those things, success comes down to luck and temperament. And this raises a big question.
Many people try very hard to make as much money as possible from their investments. Serious academic work on the field begins with Louis Bachelier in 1900. And yet being more intelligent than average does almost nothing for an investor. Once you understand basic arithmetic and can imagine different possible futures at the same time, what matters is saving regularly, investing according to a clear strategy, and ignoring anyone who encourages you to change course after less than ten years. You cannot use your intelligence to predict the future of markets any better than anyone else, and you don’t need to make predictions to make money. Hard work is not a virtue in investing either: as Jack Bogle used to say, “don’t do something just stand there!” How many other areas of life are like this? Intelligence and hard work are useful in many areas of life, but not in this one.
Herodotus and Aristotle were wrong that being wise lets you predict the future and get rich. The science-fiction fans in California who think they can have success without effort if they just have a big IQ are wrong too. But Iranians and Indians never agreed again about the daevas, even after wave after wave of Iranian immigration into India. I don’t think this post will convince these people either. What I do think is that skepticism and humbleness about your own limits can save you from many follies. It can be profitable to go along with the latest nonsense. Sometimes you even manage to get out before it all falls apart with your life and your reputation intact. But the jug that is brought to the well too often breaks, and these people keep returning to dangerous follies from a hundred years ago. Some have already ended up in prison, or burned out from the drugs and the obsessive talk about the depravity of mankind and the immanence of the Machine God, and the rest are closer to the precipice than they want to believe.
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.
Oliver Cromwell before the Battle of DunbarIn lieu of donations, I will ask that you listen to one more thing. If you ever meet people who are lively conversationalists and very confident in their brains but say horrible things with a polite tone, the rest of your life may pivot on whether you distance yourself from them or stay in the room. I stopped following their websites and podcasts and found a different martial-arts club, and stayed a poor but honest man. These people were too scared of conflict to say “no Nazi shit,” or too greedy for a chance to pitch their own crank idea to object to the other cranks in the room, and it gained them a few pieces of Bitcoin but cost them their souls. You can always earn more money, but souls are issued one per person.
(scheduled August 2026)
- The philological and religious debate about the chronology is exciting but not for this blog! Encyclopedia Iranica has no entry on pre-Islamic traditions about the div but the Wikipedia entry for daeva is not bad. ↩︎
- This can be seen in their obsession with prediction markets and futurism and IQ scores, and their boasting that they were only a week behind the US government in deciding that COVID would be a big deal (they don’t boast that they gave up infection control in 2022 or so, although they are very keen to debate whether China was to blame). ↩︎
- Robert Rollinger, “The Western Expansion of the ‘Median Empire’: A Re-Examination,” in Giovanni Lanfranchi et al., eds., Continuity of Empire (?) (S.A.R.G.O.N. Edetrice: Padova, 2003) pp. 307-310 ↩︎
- Nathan Vardi, “David Tepper, Andrew Beal and Bill Conway: The Top People In Finance Speak About The Markets,” Forbes, 12 May 2016 ↩︎
- Alfred Cowles 3rd., “Can Stock Market Forecasters Forecast?” Econometrica 1, no. 3 (1933): 309–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/1907042 For subsequent research see William J. Bernstein, The Four Pillars of Investing, Second Edition (McGraw Hill: New York, 2023) pp. 68, 69. ↩︎
- Berber Jin, Ben Cohen, and Anissa Gardizy, The Connections That Turned a Precocious Teen Into the Fallen ‘Nostradamus of AI’, The Wall Street Journal, 25 August 2026. This article does not discuss Aschebnrenner’s shorts on stocks which he thought would be hurt by chatbots, giving him a portfolio of borrowed money in holdings which would all go up or down together. Even a chatbot could have told him this was very risky. The authors did not even try to explain how Aschenbrenner thought really smart computers would lead to faster-than-light travel because Silicon Valley is a silly place (I can’t explain it either although American science fiction fans have hated relativity for a long time). ↩︎
- Mebane T. Faber’s Global Asset Allocation (The Idea Farm LP, 2015) is one good place to start. He found that from 1973 to 2013, all sensible portfolios returned investors in the USA somewhere between 4% a year and 6% a year after inflation if you picked one and stuck with it. If you switched from whatever strategy was having a bad decade to whatever was doing well this year you would perform poorly, because all strategies have good decades and bad decades, and changing course to whatever has done well recently just locks in your losses while giving up some of the good times. ↩︎
- Dave Chilton, The Wealthy Barber Returns (Financial Awareness Corp, 2011) pp. 170-171 ↩︎
- Efficient Market Theorists have a Mirror Universe version of this policy, where if stocks in Syldavia are booming, that is not a sign to cash in some of your winnings but the rational market deciding that Syldavia is the best place to invest. I don’t take investment advice from people with goatees under a sword-and-planet logo but you do you ↩︎
- I can’t resist putting a European company called AI Alpha Lab in to the historical record. Its marketing pitch is breathtaking: “Initializing AI Alpha Lab… Connected. Thank you for visiting our site. I am an AI model specifically developed for investing, nothing else. I use data and probabilities to make investment decisions. I have no biases or preferences. And no humans interfere with my investment decisions. Welcome to the future of investing. Today.” Anyone with Math 12, a Raspberry Pi, and a brokerage account can apply factor investing, but the problems are always getting humans to stick with it and the possibility that the future is not like the past. Many investing strategies work brilliantly until they don’t, and many people say they will stay the course then withdraw their money the first time their account drops 20%. More experts, more data, and more number-crunching cannot avoid these basic problems. ↩︎
- One site pushing “return stacking” proposes for the sake of argument that you can borrow money at 0.5% greater than the yield of a 90-day U.S. government treasury bill. Indeed, if I could borrow money as cheaply as the Irvings can, all kinds of wonderful opportunities would open up for me! ↩︎
- Eg. Dimensional Fund Advisors’ ten-year annualized return for Canadian equities is 13.03% which is a quarter of a percent higher than a plain old TSX index like XIC (12.74%) or VCN (12.63%). When you read the prospectus you realized that to invest in Dimensional’s products you need a paid advisor who will generally charge at least 0.75% a year. Cullen Roche spent ten years developing a rule to switch between stocks and bonds based on macroeconomic statistics which has historically returned 0.12% more a year than a simple 60/40 portfolio (Your Perfect Portfolio p. 212). This strategy requires frequently selling stocks to buy bonds or bonds to buy stocks, which is a taxable event in a non-registered account. Meb Faber has his own version of this idea with the same impressive backtest and the same problems of tax drag and how to know if the strategy will continue to work: Meb Faber, “A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation,” The Journal of Wealth Management, Spring 2007 https://ssrn.com/abstract=962461. ↩︎
- William J. Bernstein, If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly (self-published, 2014) ↩︎
- Bernstein calls this the engineer’s mistake (Four Pillars of Investing, second edition p. 194) and uses phrases like “less math, more Shakespeare.” ↩︎
-
Investing is Einstein’s Cat, or, The Thales Fallacy
This is a cat named Einstein not Einstein’s cat, but isn’t he gorgeous? You can see his person reflected in his eyes. Photo from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Einstein_(7996196819).jpgTwo or three thousand years ago, Indo-European speakers who had turned back at the Khyber Pass decided that some of the gods of their fathers, the daevas, were malevolent spirits.1 Their relatives in the Indus Valley disagreed and so the languages and religions diverted. Twenty or thirty years ago, I was growing up a science-fiction fan without ever having met one in person. From yellowing paperbacks and early websites I became a twentieth-century humanist well inoculated against some of the follies which clever young men are prone to. I did not know that in California the same movement was festering into something proudly un-democratic, full of longings for yesterday’s tomorrows and resentment that not everyone recognized them as the rightful rulers. I cannot stop them, that work is for people in the United States and UK. I cannot bridge that gap. But this month I can explain what is wrong with two of their core beliefs: that intelligence is the ability to predict the future, and that predicting the future leads to success.2 The story starts with Thales of Miletus and an olive-press, and ends with Albert Einstein and a cat carrier.
After this, seeing that Alyattes would not give up the Scythians to Cyaxares at his demand, there was war between the Lydians and the Medes for five years; each won many victories over the other, and once they fought a battle by night. They were still warring with equal success, when it chanced, at an encounter which happened during the sixth year, that during the battle the day was suddenly turned to night. Thales of Miletus had foretold this loss of daylight to the Ionians, fixing it within the year in which the change did indeed happen. So when the Lydians and Medes saw the day turned to night they ceased from fighting, and both were the more zealous to make peace.
Herodotus, Histories, 1.74 tr. A.d. GodleyThales of Miletus was one of the Seven Sages of Ionia, and later Greeks decided that he must have been good at predictions too. Herodotus told a story that he predicted a solar eclipse, and Aristotle taught his students that Thales used his wisdom to predict that the olive-harvest would be bountiful, and rented all the olive-presses in Miletus and Chios in advance (Politics 1.1259a). When the olives needed pressing, he could charge what he liked. Fun-ruining historians point out that not even Babylonians could predict a solar eclipse in the sixth century BCE, and the economy in Aristotle’s story looks much more like the world he lived in than the world Thales lived in.3 The Aegean around 600 BCE was not a place where everything had a price, but a place where landlords were proud that their neighbours had to come to them and beg to use their olive-presses or borrow some barley before the harvest. The important part of the story is that later generations believed that if Thales was wise he must have been able to use his wisdom to predict the future and get rich. If you can predict something in the natural world, like the movements of the planets, you can predict things in the world of markets and get rich. Anyone who flips through a news magazine or opens YouTube can find worshipful interviews with someone who made a successful prediction in the past. But when you ask the wisest and most mathematically qualified people in investing, they have a very different attitude towards predictions.
Forecasting is for losers
In the spring of 1971, I was about to become a newly minted Ph.D. in abstract, or ‘pure,’ mathematics. … Jobs that would have challenged and fascinated me were, for me, tainted because they only contributed to a war (in Vietnam) I didn’t believe in. … I … was offered a job (at a brokerage firm in Chicago). I thought, I don’t know anything about the stock market— I don’t even know what it is— but I may as well learn about it. Besides, I should easily be able to get rich using my knowledge of mathematics, and why not? … Little was I to know how many people I would meet over the years with the same idea, all of whom would be wrong.
Mathematics PhD, long-time finance-industry consultant, and sustainability expert Michael Edesess, The Big Investment Lie (2007) pp. 1-2One day a friend of my father-of the rich and confident variety- called me during his New York visit (to set the elements of pecking order straight, he hinted right away during the call that he came by Concorde, with some derogatory comments on the comfort of such methods of transportation). He wanted to pick my brain on the state of a collection of financial markets. I truly had no opinion, nor had made any effort to formulate any, nor was I remotely interested in markets. … I … did not make predictions, period.
Hedge-fund quant Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness (2004) pp. 102, 103The important turning points in markets are never identified with precision in advance by ‘experts’ and policymakers. This lack of foresight is not surprising, because markets and the course of the economy are not model-able scientific phenomena but rather are examples of mass human behavior, which are never predictable with anything like precision.
Hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, interview with Forbes, 20164But people don’t always want the best risk adjusted returns, sometimes people want to speculate … They want to express an informational belief, and who am I to say that’s wrong?
Certified Financial Planner Ben Felix, Rational Reminder podcast episode 201 (2022, automated transcript has not been verified)Most successful investors do not try to predict the future, except in the way you predict that it is more likely to be sunny in summer than winter and you are more likely to get the job if you apply for it. Markets are so unpredictable that it can take fifteen or twenty years to tell the difference between skill and luck. When people sit down to determine “Can Stock Market Forecasters Forecast?” they get the same answer as Alfred Cowles in 1933: no.5 The last century or so of investment history is dotted with unprecedented events, from the Russian Revolution to the decline of dividend yields in the 1950s to the Zero Interest-Rate Policy. You can learn to expect a sequence of booms and busts by studying the past, but not foresee these black swans which are only in the future. Moreover, you have to be able to survive the times that things do not happen the way you expect, as one 24-year-old investor found out. He was so confident that AI would let him buy entire galaxies like an E.E. “Doc” Smith character (and in the excellent grades he had received on standardized tests) that he did not worry that his stocks might fall in value in the short term.6 Rather than trying to guess the one thing which will happen, executives focus their thinking about the many things which might happen and how to survive each. So while being able to predict the future would be nice, there seems to be no reliable way to do it, except in the way an insurance company predicts about how many clients will make claims in the next fiscal year. Trying to do what almost no one can do is not not a good strategy.
Instead, the way to get and stay rich is to follow a few simple rules: save every month, invest it in a diversified mix of revenue-generating assets without paying too much to middlemen, protect it from the taxman and friends and relations with open hands, and repeat for decades while those assets grow. Exactly what those assets are matters surprisingly little, as long as most of them are stocks from profitable companies and bonds from stable governments, and as long as you spread your investments widely and keep your costs low.7 Investors since Jane Austen’s day have been used to returns of about 4% a year plus inflation, whether they held farmland, railroad bonds, or electronics stocks. Over decades, wars, market crashes, and periods of high inflation become bumps in a general upward trend. Done properly, investing is as exciting as watching grass grow, and requires about as much attention as replacing the batteries in your fire alarm once a year.
Anyone interested in personal finance can list people who followed this strategy who were not intellectual or educated. Dave Chilton gave the example of his father, who forgot about a mutual fund for years and had trouble deciphering the difference between units and dollars. Eventually they figured out that it had quadrupled in value since he opened it.8 Dividend investors tell the story of Ronald Read, a gas-station mechanic in Vermont who started to buy dividend stocks in the 1950s and gave away about $8 million when he died in 2014. Read still had his paper stock certificates sitting in a safe-deposit box, and his way of vetting potential investments was to read the Wall Street Journal every day. That was enough to get rich on a mechanic’s wage, because he did not get discouraged when his stocks went down, did not sell what was lagging to buy the latest cool thing just before it dived, and did not splurge when his investments were doing well then take risks to maintain his lifestyle in a bear market. Financial planner Allan S. Roth taught his son to be a better investor than most of his clients in second grade, because his son trusted arithmetic and did not watch business news and buy and sell based on guesses about the future.
Is there anything better?
In 44 years of Wall Street experience and study I have never seen dependable calculations made about common-stock values, or related investment policies, that went beyond simple arithmetic or the most elementary algebra. Whenever excalculus (sic) is brought in, or higher algebra, you could take it as a warning signal that the operator was trying to substitute theory for experience, and usually also to give speculation the deceptive guise of investment.
Benjamin Graham, “The New Speculation in Common Stocks,” The Analysts’ Journal, 1958 p. 20In hundreds of years, nobody has found anything which will grow money faster or with fewer ups and downs than this simple method. The closest I know are five:
- You can up your exposure to (uncertain, high-expected-yield) stocks when you are young, and hope that this time is good for the stock market and you don’t have to draw on your investments in a trough in the market or get discouraged as your savings shrink and shrink. This lifecycle model works well in practice especially when it is automated.
- You can adjust your asset allocation based on macroeconomic statistics, like buying fewer bonds when interest rates are very low and fewer Japanese stocks when the Japanese stock market is exploding like kduzu (dynamic asset allocation or contracyclical rebalancing). This is easier said than done! Done sensibly, it will drag down your returns in good times in exchange for reducing your losses in the bad. Done carelessly, it will tend to trigger taxation as you sell one asset and buy another.9
- You can pick stocks (or hire experts to pick stocks) which have specific mathematical properties or factors. The most famous models were created by Eugene Fama and Kenneth French in the United States. Their five-factor model or smart beta works great on historical data in the USA, but their attempts to apply the model have not been very successful, and others have even more trouble. If you rely on agents, they will be tempted to bend those simple mathematical rules and become just another monkey throwing darts at the finance pages or chasing the latest hot thing, and if you calculate yourself, you have to face the same temptation.10
- You can construct a portfolio with a comfortable balance of risk and return and borrow to invest (use leverage). Finance academics love this idea, but most people have trouble borrowing money at low interest, and investing borrowed money is stressful for many people.11
- You can get involved in running the businesses you partially own. Most people can’t afford to own a large part of even one business (and tying up all that money in one investment is risky), and would have to give up their old job to start working as an executive. It is not a very useful insight that if you were brilliant at your job you would make more money, and if you were paid more you could save more!
The remarkable thing is that these all take some time and math skills, and they do not put you very far ahead of a waitress putting $500 a paycheque towards blue-chip dividend stocks. The waitress might have more ups and downs, but the economist might be ruined when managed futures don’t move as independently from stocks and bonds as the computer said they would. Most honest advocates for these methods estimate that they can gain a fraction of a percent in annual return, or reduce annual volatility by a few percent while keeping expected returns the same.12 That is something but not nearly as much as you gain by realizing that there is no point in paying a fund manager 2% a year to pick stocks for you, or moving from one fund to another because of something you heard on the radio.
Man is the rationalizing animal
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Alexander Pope
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.
Benjamin GrahamThere are also risks in looking for anything better. Humans are very good at deceiving themselves and finding patterns in noise (pareidolia). Very many intelligent people have convinced themselves that they know how to pick stocks or buy high-yield bonds and sell them just before they crash, and very many have ruined themselves because of this. The financial services industry is full of people whose job is to convince you to give them control of your money, from columnists telling you what to sell to the nice man who promises he has a way to make securitized mortgages a safe investment. They will keep a percentage regardless of whether their advice is good. Everyone is lying to you for money, and many are lying to themselves. Another twentieth-century humanist, William J. Bernstein, suggests treating anyone in the financial services industry like a hardened criminal.13 Intermediaries such as the news industry are engaged in entertaining you with future babble and selling sales pitches disguised as popular science. Trading sites and apps are often designed to look sophisticated and stimulating not help you focus on the few relevant facts a few times per year (after all, the people who think they can pick stocks or guess which way interest rates will go are willing to pay for tools, whereas the people who admit they are no good at either just want a few publicly-available numbers in a simple display, so the money is in serving the stock-pickers). The risk of looking for something better is not just that it takes time you could spend reading a book or riding your bike. It is that you will convince yourself or be convinced to do something which is riskier than you know.
Most successful investors do not try to predict the future. Instead, they decide on a pattern of behavior which will have good outcomes in most possible futures, and follow it for decades until randomness has time to average out. If the stock market crashes and does not recover for a decade, your bonds will save you. If the government defaults on its debt, your stocks will save you. If your country is taken over by thieves and ignoramuses, your international assets will protect you (Robeco in the Netherlands saw which way the wind was blowing and spent the 1930s investing in the United States, and were able to report that their surviving clients had done very well by 1946). You don’t need to know which of these will happen when to create an investment policy which can defend against them, any more than a farmer moving her house off a floodplain has to know when the river will rise. She just has to know how high the water has been in the past fifty or one hundred years, and whether there is any reason to think it could go even higher soon. Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 24-year-old who turned a viral essay into a hedge fund, had to watch one of his institutional investors bidding for his assets when he sold at fire-sale prices. They were ready to make money if he was right, and money if he was wrong, and they did not care which because there were a hundred other people with more money than sense in their portfolios and they expected that most of them would blow up.
Brains are overrated
You don’t need a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.
Warren Buffet, Fortune 1990 Investor’s Guide, as quoted by Chris LeithnerSome kinds of Americans (but probably not my gentle readers) like to talk about IQ scores. A contrarian in Australia has gathered the evidence that whatever IQ tests measure is not a help for investors at all. The traits which make a good investor are old-fashioned moral virtues like the ability to live within your means, ignore groupthink and social pressure, acknowledge your own limits, and act rationally when you are terrified. Very clever people without those virtues end up blowing their money studying candle charts or investing in the South Sea Bubble near the peak. If you want to know whether someone will be a good investor, focus on those virtues and behaviors not on things which are loosely correlated with them. If you want to be a better investor, meditating on the Stoics is worth a dozen textbooks on Modern Portfolio Theory. Randall Munro warns of the Engineer Syllogism: some of the worst investors are people with quantitative training, self-confidence, and a love of analyzing systems to find and exploit the hidden rules.14
Cat!
I’m not saying that professional money-managers are not smart or knowledgeable people. They are usually well educated. They try to keep themselves well informed about the economy, market sectors, technologies, and current public affairs. This doesn’t mean they they can predict the market or the price of stocks.
Mathematics PhD, long-time finance-industry consultant, and sustainability expert Michael Edesess, The Big Investment Lie (2007) p. 91When Maciej Ceglowski discovered people dreaming of superintelligence, someone introduced him to Einstein’s cat. Albert Einstein was much more intelligent than a cat, at least as people who dream of superintelligence understand smarts, but that did not let him just tell his cat to get in the carrier. He could beg and offer treats using the best feline psychology the 1940s had to offer, but he could not make the cat do what he wanted without pitting sweater and skin against maws and claws. There are fundamental limits to what you can do just by being smart or intelligent. Investment is another example. The very basics of investment can be grasped and carried out by a child. Once you know those things, success comes down to luck and temperament. And this raises a big question.
Many people try very hard to make as much money as possible from their investments. Serious academic work on the field begins with Louis Bachelier in 1900. And yet being more intelligent than average does almost nothing for an investor. Once you understand basic arithmetic and can imagine different possible futures at the same time, what matters is saving regularly, investing according to a clear strategy, and ignoring anyone who encourages you to change course after less than ten years. You cannot use your intelligence to predict the future of markets any better than anyone else, and you don’t need to make predictions to make money. Hard work is not a virtue in investing either: as Jack Bogle used to say, “don’t do something just stand there!” How many other areas of life are like this? Intelligence and hard work are useful in many areas of life, but not in this one.
Herodotus and Aristotle were wrong that being wise lets you predict the future and get rich. The science-fiction fans in California who think they can have success without effort if they just have a big IQ are wrong too. But Iranians and Indians never agreed again about the daevas, even after wave after wave of Iranian immigration into India. I don’t think this post will convince these people either. What I do think is that skepticism and humbleness about your own limits can save you from many follies. It can be profitable to go along with the latest nonsense. Sometimes you even manage to get out before it all falls apart with your life and your reputation intact. But the jug that is brought to the well too often breaks, and these people keep returning to dangerous follies from a hundred years ago. Some have already ended up in prison, or burned out from the drugs and the obsessive talk about the depravity of mankind and the immanence of the Machine God, and the rest are closer to the precipice than they want to believe.
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.
Oliver Cromwell before the Battle of DunbarIn lieu of donations, I will ask that you listen to one more thing. If you ever meet people who are lively conversationalists and very confident in their brains but say horrible things with a polite tone, the rest of your life may pivot on whether you distance yourself from them or stay in the room. I stopped following their websites and podcasts and found a different martial-arts club, and stayed a poor but honest man. These people were too scared of conflict to say “no Nazi shit,” or too greedy for a chance to pitch their own crank idea to object to the other cranks in the room, and it gained them a few pieces of Bitcoin but cost them their souls. You can always earn more money, but souls are issued one per person.
(scheduled August 2026)
- The philological and religious debate about the chronology is exciting but not for this blog! Encyclopedia Iranica has no entry on pre-Islamic traditions about the div but the Wikipedia entry for daeva is not bad. ↩︎
- This can be seen in their obsession with prediction markets and futurism and IQ scores, and their boasting that they were only a week behind the US government in deciding that COVID would be a big deal (they don’t boast that they gave up infection control in 2022 or so, although they are very keen to debate whether China was to blame). ↩︎
- Robert Rollinger, “The Western Expansion of the ‘Median Empire’: A Re-Examination,” in Giovanni Lanfranchi et al., eds., Continuity of Empire (?) (S.A.R.G.O.N. Edetrice: Padova, 2003) pp. 307-310 ↩︎
- Nathan Vardi, “David Tepper, Andrew Beal and Bill Conway: The Top People In Finance Speak About The Markets,” Forbes, 12 May 2016 ↩︎
- Alfred Cowles 3rd., “Can Stock Market Forecasters Forecast?” Econometrica 1, no. 3 (1933): 309–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/1907042 For subsequent research see William J. Bernstein, The Four Pillars of Investing, Second Edition (McGraw Hill: New York, 2023) pp. 68, 69. ↩︎
- Berber Jin, Ben Cohen, and Anissa Gardizy, The Connections That Turned a Precocious Teen Into the Fallen ‘Nostradamus of AI’, The Wall Street Journal, 25 August 2026. This article does not discuss Aschebnrenner’s shorts on stocks which he thought would be hurt by chatbots, giving him a portfolio of borrowed money in holdings which would all go up or down together. Even a chatbot could have told him this was very risky. The authors did not even try to explain how Aschenbrenner thought really smart computers would lead to faster-than-light travel because Silicon Valley is a silly place (I can’t explain it either although American science fiction fans have hated relativity for a long time). ↩︎
- Mebane T. Faber’s Global Asset Allocation (The Idea Farm LP, 2015) is one good place to start. He found that from 1973 to 2013, all sensible portfolios returned investors in the USA somewhere between 4% a year and 6% a year after inflation if you picked one and stuck with it. If you switched from whatever strategy was having a bad decade to whatever was doing well this year you would perform poorly, because all strategies have good decades and bad decades, and changing course to whatever has done well recently just locks in your losses while giving up some of the good times. ↩︎
- Dave Chilton, The Wealthy Barber Returns (Financial Awareness Corp, 2011) pp. 170-171 ↩︎
- Efficient Market Theorists have a Mirror Universe version of this policy, where if stocks in Syldavia are booming, that is not a sign to cash in some of your winnings but the rational market deciding that Syldavia is the best place to invest. I don’t take investment advice from people with goatees under a sword-and-planet logo but you do you ↩︎
- I can’t resist putting a European company called AI Alpha Lab in to the historical record. Its marketing pitch is breathtaking: “Initializing AI Alpha Lab… Connected. Thank you for visiting our site. I am an AI model specifically developed for investing, nothing else. I use data and probabilities to make investment decisions. I have no biases or preferences. And no humans interfere with my investment decisions. Welcome to the future of investing. Today.” Anyone with Math 12, a Raspberry Pi, and a brokerage account can apply factor investing, but the problems are always getting humans to stick with it and the possibility that the future is not like the past. Many investing strategies work brilliantly until they don’t, and many people say they will stay the course then withdraw their money the first time their account drops 20%. More experts, more data, and more number-crunching cannot avoid these basic problems. ↩︎
- One site pushing “return stacking” proposes for the sake of argument that you can borrow money at 0.5% greater than the yield of a 90-day U.S. government treasury bill. Indeed, if I could borrow money as cheaply as the Irvings can, all kinds of wonderful opportunities would open up for me! ↩︎
- Eg. Dimensional Fund Advisors’ ten-year annualized return for Canadian equities is 13.03% which is a quarter of a percent higher than a plain old TSX index like XIC (12.74%) or VCN (12.63%). When you read the prospectus you realized that to invest in Dimensional’s products you need a paid advisor who will generally charge at least 0.75% a year. Cullen Roche spent ten years developing a rule to switch between stocks and bonds based on macroeconomic statistics which has historically returned 0.12% more a year than a simple 60/40 portfolio (Your Perfect Portfolio p. 212). This strategy requires frequently selling stocks to buy bonds or bonds to buy stocks, which is a taxable event in a non-registered account. Meb Faber has his own version of this idea with the same impressive backtest and the same problems of tax drag and how to know if the strategy will continue to work: Meb Faber, “A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation,” The Journal of Wealth Management, Spring 2007 https://ssrn.com/abstract=962461. ↩︎
- William J. Bernstein, If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly (self-published, 2014) ↩︎
- Bernstein calls this the engineer’s mistake (Four Pillars of Investing, second edition p. 194) and uses phrases like “less math, more Shakespeare.” ↩︎
-
Investing is Einstein’s Cat, or, The Thales Fallacy
This is a cat named Einstein not Einstein’s cat, but isn’t he gorgeous? You can see his person reflected in his eyes. Photo from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Einstein_(7996196819).jpgTwo or three thousand years ago, Indo-European speakers who had turned back at the Khyber Pass decided that some of the gods of their fathers, the daevas, were malevolent spirits.1 Their relatives in the Indus Valley disagreed and so the languages and religions diverted. Twenty or thirty years ago, I was growing up a science-fiction fan without ever having met one in person. From yellowing paperbacks and early websites I became a twentieth-century humanist well inoculated against some of the follies which clever young men are prone to. I did not know that in California the same movement was festering into something proudly un-democratic, full of longings for yesterday’s tomorrows and resentment that not everyone recognized them as the rightful rulers. I cannot stop them, that work is for people in the United States and UK. I cannot bridge that gap. But this month I can explain what is wrong with two of their core beliefs: that intelligence is the ability to predict the future, and that predicting the future leads to success.2 The story starts with Thales of Miletus and an olive-press, and ends with Albert Einstein and a cat carrier.
After this, seeing that Alyattes would not give up the Scythians to Cyaxares at his demand, there was war between the Lydians and the Medes for five years; each won many victories over the other, and once they fought a battle by night. They were still warring with equal success, when it chanced, at an encounter which happened during the sixth year, that during the battle the day was suddenly turned to night. Thales of Miletus had foretold this loss of daylight to the Ionians, fixing it within the year in which the change did indeed happen. So when the Lydians and Medes saw the day turned to night they ceased from fighting, and both were the more zealous to make peace.
Herodotus, Histories, 1.74 tr. A.d. GodleyThales of Miletus was one of the Seven Sages of Ionia, and later Greeks decided that he must have been good at predictions too. Herodotus told a story that he predicted a solar eclipse, and Aristotle taught his students that Thales used his wisdom to predict that the olive-harvest would be bountiful, and rented all the olive-presses in Miletus and Chios in advance (Politics 1.1259a). When the olives needed pressing, he could charge what he liked. Fun-ruining historians point out that not even Babylonians could predict a solar eclipse in the sixth century BCE, and the economy in Aristotle’s story looks much more like the world he lived in than the world Thales lived in.3 The Aegean around 600 BCE was not a place where everything had a price, but a place where landlords were proud that their neighbours had to come to them and beg to use their olive-presses or borrow some barley before the harvest. The important part of the story is that later generations believed that if Thales was wise he must have been able to use his wisdom to predict the future and get rich. If you can predict something in the natural world, like the movements of the planets, you can predict things in the world of markets and get rich. Anyone who flips through a news magazine or opens YouTube can find worshipful interviews with someone who made a successful prediction in the past. But when you ask the wisest and most mathematically qualified people in investing, they have a very different attitude towards predictions.
Forecasting is for losers
In the spring of 1971, I was about to become a newly minted Ph.D. in abstract, or ‘pure,’ mathematics. … Jobs that would have challenged and fascinated me were, for me, tainted because they only contributed to a war (in Vietnam) I didn’t believe in. … I … was offered a job (at a brokerage firm in Chicago). I thought, I don’t know anything about the stock market— I don’t even know what it is— but I may as well learn about it. Besides, I should easily be able to get rich using my knowledge of mathematics, and why not? … Little was I to know how many people I would meet over the years with the same idea, all of whom would be wrong.
Mathematics PhD, long-time finance-industry consultant, and sustainability expert Michael Edesess, The Big Investment Lie (2007) pp. 1-2One day a friend of my father-of the rich and confident variety- called me during his New York visit (to set the elements of pecking order straight, he hinted right away during the call that he came by Concorde, with some derogatory comments on the comfort of such methods of transportation). He wanted to pick my brain on the state of a collection of financial markets. I truly had no opinion, nor had made any effort to formulate any, nor was I remotely interested in markets. … I … did not make predictions, period.
Hedge-fund quant Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness (2004) pp. 102, 103The important turning points in markets are never identified with precision in advance by ‘experts’ and policymakers. This lack of foresight is not surprising, because markets and the course of the economy are not model-able scientific phenomena but rather are examples of mass human behavior, which are never predictable with anything like precision.
Hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, interview with Forbes, 20164But people don’t always want the best risk adjusted returns, sometimes people want to speculate … They want to express an informational belief, and who am I to say that’s wrong?
Certified Financial Planner Ben Felix, Rational Reminder podcast episode 201 (2022, automated transcript has not been verified)Most successful investors do not try to predict the future, except in the way you predict that it is more likely to be sunny in summer than winter and you are more likely to get the job if you apply for it. Markets are so unpredictable that it can take fifteen or twenty years to tell the difference between skill and luck. When people sit down to determine “Can Stock Market Forecasters Forecast?” they get the same answer as Alfred Cowles in 1933: no.5 The last century or so of investment history is dotted with unprecedented events, from the Russian Revolution to the decline of dividend yields in the 1950s to the Zero Interest-Rate Policy. You can learn to expect a sequence of booms and busts by studying the past, but not foresee these black swans which are only in the future. Moreover, you have to be able to survive the times that things do not happen the way you expect, as one 24-year-old investor found out. He was so confident that AI would let him buy entire galaxies like an E.E. “Doc” Smith character (and in the excellent grades he had received on standardized tests) that he did not worry that his stocks might fall in value in the short term.6 Rather than trying to guess the one thing which will happen, executives focus their thinking about the many things which might happen and how to survive each. So while being able to predict the future would be nice, there seems to be no reliable way to do it, except in the way an insurance company predicts about how many clients will make claims in the next fiscal year. Trying to do what almost no one can do is not not a good strategy.
Instead, the way to get and stay rich is to follow a few simple rules: save every month, invest it in a diversified mix of revenue-generating assets without paying too much to middlemen, protect it from the taxman and friends and relations with open hands, and repeat for decades while those assets grow. Exactly what those assets are matters surprisingly little, as long as most of them are stocks from profitable companies and bonds from stable governments, and as long as you spread your investments widely and keep your costs low.7 Investors since Jane Austen’s day have been used to returns of about 4% a year plus inflation, whether they held farmland, railroad bonds, or electronics stocks. Over decades, wars, market crashes, and periods of high inflation become bumps in a general upward trend. Done properly, investing is as exciting as watching grass grow, and requires about as much attention as replacing the batteries in your fire alarm once a year.
Anyone interested in personal finance can list people who followed this strategy who were not intellectual or educated. Dave Chilton gave the example of his father, who forgot about a mutual fund for years and had trouble deciphering the difference between units and dollars. Eventually they figured out that it had quadrupled in value since he opened it.8 Dividend investors tell the story of Ronald Read, a gas-station mechanic in Vermont who started to buy dividend stocks in the 1950s and gave away about $8 million when he died in 2014. Read still had his paper stock certificates sitting in a safe-deposit box, and his way of vetting potential investments was to read the Wall Street Journal every day. That was enough to get rich on a mechanic’s wage, because he did not get discouraged when his stocks went down, did not sell what was lagging to buy the latest cool thing just before it dived, and did not splurge when his investments were doing well then take risks to maintain his lifestyle in a bear market. Financial planner Allan S. Roth taught his son to be a better investor than most of his clients in second grade, because his son trusted arithmetic and did not watch business news and buy and sell based on guesses about the future.
Is there anything better?
In 44 years of Wall Street experience and study I have never seen dependable calculations made about common-stock values, or related investment policies, that went beyond simple arithmetic or the most elementary algebra. Whenever excalculus (sic) is brought in, or higher algebra, you could take it as a warning signal that the operator was trying to substitute theory for experience, and usually also to give speculation the deceptive guise of investment.
Benjamin Graham, “The New Speculation in Common Stocks,” The Analysts’ Journal, 1958 p. 20In hundreds of years, nobody has found anything which will grow money faster or with fewer ups and downs than this simple method. The closest I know are five:
- You can up your exposure to (uncertain, high-expected-yield) stocks when you are young, and hope that this time is good for the stock market and you don’t have to draw on your investments in a trough in the market or get discouraged as your savings shrink and shrink. This lifecycle model works well in practice especially when it is automated.
- You can adjust your asset allocation based on macroeconomic statistics, like buying fewer bonds when interest rates are very low and fewer Japanese stocks when the Japanese stock market is exploding like kduzu (dynamic asset allocation or contracyclical rebalancing). This is easier said than done! Done sensibly, it will drag down your returns in good times in exchange for reducing your losses in the bad. Done carelessly, it will tend to trigger taxation as you sell one asset and buy another.9
- You can pick stocks (or hire experts to pick stocks) which have specific mathematical properties or factors. The most famous models were created by Eugene Fama and Kenneth French in the United States. Their five-factor model or smart beta works great on historical data in the USA, but their attempts to apply the model have not been very successful, and others have even more trouble. If you rely on agents, they will be tempted to bend those simple mathematical rules and become just another monkey throwing darts at the finance pages or chasing the latest hot thing, and if you calculate yourself, you have to face the same temptation.10
- You can construct a portfolio with a comfortable balance of risk and return and borrow to invest (use leverage). Finance academics love this idea, but most people have trouble borrowing money at low interest, and investing borrowed money is stressful for many people.11
- You can get involved in running the businesses you partially own. Most people can’t afford to own a large part of even one business (and tying up all that money in one investment is risky), and would have to give up their old job to start working as an executive. It is not a very useful insight that if you were brilliant at your job you would make more money, and if you were paid more you could save more!
The remarkable thing is that these all take some time and math skills, and they do not put you very far ahead of a waitress putting $500 a paycheque towards blue-chip dividend stocks. The waitress might have more ups and downs, but the economist might be ruined when managed futures don’t move as independently from stocks and bonds as the computer said they would. Most honest advocates for these methods estimate that they can gain a fraction of a percent in annual return, or reduce annual volatility by a few percent while keeping expected returns the same.12 That is something but not nearly as much as you gain by realizing that there is no point in paying a fund manager 2% a year to pick stocks for you, or moving from one fund to another because of something you heard on the radio.
Man is the rationalizing animal
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Alexander Pope
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.
Benjamin GrahamThere are also risks in looking for anything better. Humans are very good at deceiving themselves and finding patterns in noise (pareidolia). Very many intelligent people have convinced themselves that they know how to pick stocks or buy high-yield bonds and sell them just before they crash, and very many have ruined themselves because of this. The financial services industry is full of people whose job is to convince you to give them control of your money, from columnists telling you what to sell to the nice man who promises he has a way to make securitized mortgages a safe investment. They will keep a percentage regardless of whether their advice is good. Everyone is lying to you for money, and many are lying to themselves. Another twentieth-century humanist, William J. Bernstein, suggests treating anyone in the financial services industry like a hardened criminal.13 Intermediaries such as the news industry are engaged in entertaining you with future babble and selling sales pitches disguised as popular science. Trading sites and apps are often designed to look sophisticated and stimulating not help you focus on the few relevant facts a few times per year (after all, the people who think they can pick stocks or guess which way interest rates will go are willing to pay for tools, whereas the people who admit they are no good at either just want a few publicly-available numbers in a simple display, so the money is in serving the stock-pickers). The risk of looking for something better is not just that it takes time you could spend reading a book or riding your bike. It is that you will convince yourself or be convinced to do something which is riskier than you know.
Most successful investors do not try to predict the future. Instead, they decide on a pattern of behavior which will have good outcomes in most possible futures, and follow it for decades until randomness has time to average out. If the stock market crashes and does not recover for a decade, your bonds will save you. If the government defaults on its debt, your stocks will save you. If your country is taken over by thieves and ignoramuses, your international assets will protect you (Robeco in the Netherlands saw which way the wind was blowing and spent the 1930s investing in the United States, and were able to report that their surviving clients had done very well by 1946). You don’t need to know which of these will happen when to create an investment policy which can defend against them, any more than a farmer moving her house off a floodplain has to know when the river will rise. She just has to know how high the water has been in the past fifty or one hundred years, and whether there is any reason to think it could go even higher soon. Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 24-year-old who turned a viral essay into a hedge fund, had to watch one of his institutional investors bidding for his assets when he sold at fire-sale prices. They were ready to make money if he was right, and money if he was wrong, and they did not care which because there were a hundred other people with more money than sense in their portfolios and they expected that most of them would blow up.
Brains are overrated
You don’t need a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.
Warren Buffet, Fortune 1990 Investor’s Guide, as quoted by Chris LeithnerSome kinds of Americans (but probably not my gentle readers) like to talk about IQ scores. A contrarian in Australia has gathered the evidence that whatever IQ tests measure is not a help for investors at all. The traits which make a good investor are old-fashioned moral virtues like the ability to live within your means, ignore groupthink and social pressure, acknowledge your own limits, and act rationally when you are terrified. Very clever people without those virtues end up blowing their money studying candle charts or investing in the South Sea Bubble near the peak. If you want to know whether someone will be a good investor, focus on those virtues and behaviors not on things which are loosely correlated with them. If you want to be a better investor, meditating on the Stoics is worth a dozen textbooks on Modern Portfolio Theory. Randall Munro warns of the Engineer Syllogism: some of the worst investors are people with quantitative training, self-confidence, and a love of analyzing systems to find and exploit the hidden rules.14
Cat!
I’m not saying that professional money-managers are not smart or knowledgeable people. They are usually well educated. They try to keep themselves well informed about the economy, market sectors, technologies, and current public affairs. This doesn’t mean they they can predict the market or the price of stocks.
Mathematics PhD, long-time finance-industry consultant, and sustainability expert Michael Edesess, The Big Investment Lie (2007) p. 91When Maciej Ceglowski discovered people dreaming of superintelligence, someone introduced him to Einstein’s cat. Albert Einstein was much more intelligent than a cat, at least as people who dream of superintelligence understand smarts, but that did not let him just tell his cat to get in the carrier. He could beg and offer treats using the best feline psychology the 1940s had to offer, but he could not make the cat do what he wanted without pitting sweater and skin against maws and claws. There are fundamental limits to what you can do just by being smart or intelligent. Investment is another example. The very basics of investment can be grasped and carried out by a child. Once you know those things, success comes down to luck and temperament. And this raises a big question.
Many people try very hard to make as much money as possible from their investments. Serious academic work on the field begins with Louis Bachelier in 1900. And yet being more intelligent than average does almost nothing for an investor. Once you understand basic arithmetic and can imagine different possible futures at the same time, what matters is saving regularly, investing according to a clear strategy, and ignoring anyone who encourages you to change course after less than ten years. You cannot use your intelligence to predict the future of markets any better than anyone else, and you don’t need to make predictions to make money. Hard work is not a virtue in investing either: as Jack Bogle used to say, “don’t do something just stand there!” How many other areas of life are like this? Intelligence and hard work are useful in many areas of life, but not in this one.
Herodotus and Aristotle were wrong that being wise lets you predict the future and get rich. The science-fiction fans in California who think they can have success without effort if they just have a big IQ are wrong too. But Iranians and Indians never agreed again about the daevas, even after wave after wave of Iranian immigration into India. I don’t think this post will convince these people either. What I do think is that skepticism and humbleness about your own limits can save you from many follies. It can be profitable to go along with the latest nonsense. Sometimes you even manage to get out before it all falls apart with your life and your reputation intact. But the jug that is brought to the well too often breaks, and these people keep returning to dangerous follies from a hundred years ago. Some have already ended up in prison, or burned out from the drugs and the obsessive talk about the depravity of mankind and the immanence of the Machine God, and the rest are closer to the precipice than they want to believe.
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.
Oliver Cromwell before the Battle of DunbarIn lieu of donations, I will ask that you listen to one more thing. If you ever meet people who are lively conversationalists and very confident in their brains but say horrible things with a polite tone, the rest of your life may pivot on whether you distance yourself from them or stay in the room. I stopped following their websites and podcasts and found a different martial-arts club, and stayed a poor but honest man. These people were too scared of conflict to say “no Nazi shit,” or too greedy for a chance to pitch their own crank idea to object to the other cranks in the room, and it gained them a few pieces of Bitcoin but cost them their souls. You can always earn more money, but souls are issued one per person.
(scheduled August 2026)
- The philological and religious debate about the chronology is exciting but not for this blog! Encyclopedia Iranica has no entry on pre-Islamic traditions about the div but the Wikipedia entry for daeva is not bad. ↩︎
- This can be seen in their obsession with prediction markets and futurism and IQ scores, and their boasting that they were only a week behind the US government in deciding that COVID would be a big deal (they don’t boast that they gave up infection control in 2022 or so, although they are very keen to debate whether China was to blame). ↩︎
- Robert Rollinger, “The Western Expansion of the ‘Median Empire’: A Re-Examination,” in Giovanni Lanfranchi et al., eds., Continuity of Empire (?) (S.A.R.G.O.N. Edetrice: Padova, 2003) pp. 307-310 ↩︎
- Nathan Vardi, “David Tepper, Andrew Beal and Bill Conway: The Top People In Finance Speak About The Markets,” Forbes, 12 May 2016 ↩︎
- Alfred Cowles 3rd., “Can Stock Market Forecasters Forecast?” Econometrica 1, no. 3 (1933): 309–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/1907042 For subsequent research see William J. Bernstein, The Four Pillars of Investing, Second Edition (McGraw Hill: New York, 2023) pp. 68, 69. ↩︎
- Berber Jin, Ben Cohen, and Anissa Gardizy, The Connections That Turned a Precocious Teen Into the Fallen ‘Nostradamus of AI’, The Wall Street Journal, 25 August 2026. This article does not discuss Aschebnrenner’s shorts on stocks which he thought would be hurt by chatbots, giving him a portfolio of borrowed money in holdings which would all go up or down together. Even a chatbot could have told him this was very risky. The authors did not even try to explain how Aschenbrenner thought really smart computers would lead to faster-than-light travel because Silicon Valley is a silly place (I can’t explain it either although American science fiction fans have hated relativity for a long time). ↩︎
- Mebane T. Faber’s Global Asset Allocation (The Idea Farm LP, 2015) is one good place to start. He found that from 1973 to 2013, all sensible portfolios returned investors in the USA somewhere between 4% a year and 6% a year after inflation if you picked one and stuck with it. If you switched from whatever strategy was having a bad decade to whatever was doing well this year you would perform poorly, because all strategies have good decades and bad decades, and changing course to whatever has done well recently just locks in your losses while giving up some of the good times. ↩︎
- Dave Chilton, The Wealthy Barber Returns (Financial Awareness Corp, 2011) pp. 170-171 ↩︎
- Efficient Market Theorists have a Mirror Universe version of this policy, where if stocks in Syldavia are booming, that is not a sign to cash in some of your winnings but the rational market deciding that Syldavia is the best place to invest. I don’t take investment advice from people with goatees under a sword-and-planet logo but you do you ↩︎
- I can’t resist putting a European company called AI Alpha Lab in to the historical record. Its marketing pitch is breathtaking: “Initializing AI Alpha Lab… Connected. Thank you for visiting our site. I am an AI model specifically developed for investing, nothing else. I use data and probabilities to make investment decisions. I have no biases or preferences. And no humans interfere with my investment decisions. Welcome to the future of investing. Today.” Anyone with Math 12, a Raspberry Pi, and a brokerage account can apply factor investing, but the problems are always getting humans to stick with it and the possibility that the future is not like the past. Many investing strategies work brilliantly until they don’t, and many people say they will stay the course then withdraw their money the first time their account drops 20%. More experts, more data, and more number-crunching cannot avoid these basic problems. ↩︎
- One site pushing “return stacking” proposes for the sake of argument that you can borrow money at 0.5% greater than the yield of a 90-day U.S. government treasury bill. Indeed, if I could borrow money as cheaply as the Irvings can, all kinds of wonderful opportunities would open up for me! ↩︎
- Eg. Dimensional Fund Advisors’ ten-year annualized return for Canadian equities is 13.03% which is a quarter of a percent higher than a plain old TSX index like XIC (12.74%) or VCN (12.63%). When you read the prospectus you realized that to invest in Dimensional’s products you need a paid advisor who will generally charge at least 0.75% a year. Cullen Roche spent ten years developing a rule to switch between stocks and bonds based on macroeconomic statistics which has historically returned 0.12% more a year than a simple 60/40 portfolio (Your Perfect Portfolio p. 212). This strategy requires frequently selling stocks to buy bonds or bonds to buy stocks, which is a taxable event in a non-registered account. Meb Faber has his own version of this idea with the same impressive backtest and the same problems of tax drag and how to know if the strategy will continue to work: Meb Faber, “A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation,” The Journal of Wealth Management, Spring 2007 https://ssrn.com/abstract=962461. ↩︎
- William J. Bernstein, If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly (self-published, 2014) ↩︎
- Bernstein calls this the engineer’s mistake (Four Pillars of Investing, second edition p. 194) and uses phrases like “less math, more Shakespeare.” ↩︎